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MAKERS    OF    THE    NINETEENTH    CENTURY 
Edited  by  BASIL  WILLIAMS 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 


BY 


LORD    CHARNWOOD 


• 


SECOND    EDITION 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


Printed  in  Great  Britain 


ABRAHAM    LINCOLN 

From  a  photograph  made  at  Springfield  soon  after  his  nomination  as  President 


GENERAL    EDITOR'S    PREFACE 

STATESMEN — even  the  greatest — have  rarely  won  the 
same  unquestioning  recognition  that  falls  to  the  great 
warriors  or  those  supreme  in  science,  art  or  literature. 
Not  in  their  own  lifetime  and  hardly  to  this  day  have 
the  claims  to  supremacy  of  our  own  Oliver  Cromwell, 
William  III.  and  Lord  Chatham  rested  on  so  sure  a 
foundation  as  those  of  a  Marlborough  or  a  Nelson,  a 
Newton,  a  Milton  or  a  Hogarth.  This  is  only  natural. 
A  warrior,  a  man  of  science,  an  artist  or  a  poet  are 
judged  in  the  main  by  definite  achievements,  by  the 
victories  they  have  won  over  foreign  enemies  or  over 
ignorance  and  prejudice,  by  the  joy  and  enlightenment 
they  have  brought  to  the  consciousness  of  their  own 
and  succeeding  generations.  For  the  statesman  there 
is  no  such  exact  measure  of  greatness.  The  greater  he 
is,  the  less  likely  is  his  work  to  be  marked  by  decisive 
achievement  which  can  be  recalled  by  anniversaries  or 
signalised  by  some  outstanding  event  :  the  chief  work 
of  a  great  statesman  rests  in  a  gradual  change  of 
direction  given  to  the  policy  of  his  people,  still  more  in 
a  change  of  the  spirit  within  them.  Again,  the  states 
man  must  work  with  a  rough  and  ready  instrument. 
The  soldier  finds  or  makes  his  army  ready  to  yield 
unhesitating  obedience  to  his  commands,  the  sailor 
animates  his  fleet  with  his  own  personal  touch,  and  the 
great  man  in  art,  literature  or  science  is  master  of  his 
material,  if  he  can  master  himself.  The  statesman 

355527 


vi  GENERAL  EDITOR'S   PREFACE. 

cannot  mould  a  heterogeneous  people,  as  the  men  of 
a  well-disciplined  army  or  navy  can  be  moulded,  to 
respond  to  his  call  and  his  alone.  He  has  to  do  all  his 
work  in  a  society  of  which  a  large  part  cannot  see  his 
object  and  another  large  part,  as  far  as  they  do  see  it, 
oppose  it.  Hence  his  work  at  the  best  is  often  incom 
plete  and  he  has  to  be  satisfied  with  a  rough  average 
rather  than  with  his  ideal. 

Lincoln,  one  of  the  few  supreme  statesmen  of  the 
last  three  centuries,  was  no  exception  to  this  rule.  He 
was  misunderstood  and  underrated  in  his  lifetime,  and 
even  yet  has  hardly  come  to  his  own.  For  his  place  is 
among  the  great  men  of  the  earth.  To  them  he  belongs 
by  right  of  his  immense  power  of  hard  work,  his  un 
faltering  pursuit  of  what  seemed  to  him  right,  and 
above  all  by  that  childlike  directness  and  simplicity  of 
vision  which  none  but  the  greatest  carry  beyond  their 
earliest  years.  It  is  fit  that  the  first  consideredattem.pt 
by  an  Englishman  to  give  a  picture  of  Lincoln,  the 
great  hero  of  America's  struggle  for  the  noblest  cause, 
should  come  at  a  time  when  we  in  England  are  passing 
through  as  fiery  a  trial  for  a  cause  we  feel  to  be  as  noble. 
It  is  a  time  when  we  may  learn  much  from  Lincoln's 
failures  and  success,  from  his  patience,  his  modesty, 
his  serene  optimism  and  his  eloquence,  so  simple  and  so 
magnificent. 

BASIL  WILLIAMS. 

BISCOT  CAMP, 
LUTON, 

March,  1916. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


GENERAL  EDITOR'S  PREFACE        .          .          .          .         .  v 

CHAP. 

I.     BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN      .....  I 

II.    THE  GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    .   -  16 

1.  The  Formation  of  a  National  Government      .  16 

2.  Territorial  Expansion          ....  26 

3.  The  Growth  of  the  Practice  and  Traditions  of 

the  Union  Government  ....  28 

4.  The  Missouri  Compromise  .          .          .  35 

5.  Leaders,  Parties,  and  Tendencies  in  Lincoln's 

Youth .40 

6.  Slavery  and  Southern  Society       .*        .          .  52 
k     7.  Intellectual  Development   .          .          .          •  .    59 

III.  LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER          ....  62 

1.  Life  at  New  Salem     .....  62 

2.  In  the  Illinois  Legislature   ....  69 

3.  Marriage 77 

IV.  LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  IN  RETIREMENT        .  89 

1.  The   Mexican   War   and   Lincoln's    Work  in 

Congress        ......  89 

2.  California  and  the  Compromise  of  1850           .  95 

3.  Lincoln  in  Retirement         .          .          .          .100 

4.  The  Repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise         .  108 

V.     THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN     .          .         .          .          .  115 

1.  Lincoln's  Return  to  Public  Life    .          .  115 

2.  The  Principles  and  the  Oratory  of  Lincoln     .  120 

3.  Lincoln  against  Douglas      .          .          .  135 

4.  John  Brown      .          .          .          .          .          .  149 

5.  The  Election  of  Lincoln  as  President     .          .  154 


viii  CONTENTS 

CHAP-  PAGB 

VI.     SECESSION        .....  .      169 

1.  The  Case  of  the  South  against  the  Union  .      169 

2.  The  Progress  of  Secession    .          .          .  .183 
J^The  Inauguration  of  Lincoln  as  President  .     200 

4.  The  Outbreak  of  War  .          .          .          .     206 

VII.     THE  CONDITIONS  OF  THE  WAR  .          .          .         ..     213 

VIII.     THE    OPENING    OF    THE     WAR    AND    LINCOLN'S 

ADMINISTRATION          .....  227 

1.  Preliminary  Stages  of  the  War     .          .          .  227 

2.  Bull  Run 244 

^J.  Lincoln's  Administration  Generally        .          .  249 

4.  Foreign  Policy  and  England         .          .          .255 

5.  The  Great  Questions  of  Domestic  Policy         .      264 

IX.     THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH  .          .  .  272 

1.  Military  Policy  of  the  North          .          .  .  272 

2.  The  War  in  the  West  up  to  May,  1862  .  .  278 

3.  The  War  in  the  East  up  to  May,  1863  .  .  283 

X.     EMANCIPATION          ...... 

XI.     THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY      .... 

1.  The  War  to  the  End  of  1863 

2.  Conscription  and  the  Politics  of  1863    . 

3.  The  War  in  1864 

4.  The  Second  Election  of  Lincoln  . 

XII.     THE  END 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE       ...... 

CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE         ...  . 

INDEX        ......... 

NOTE  ON  MAP. 


ABRAHAM     LINCOLN 


CHAPTER  I 

BOYHOOD    OF    LINCOLN 

THE  subject  of  this  memoir  is  revered  by  multitudes 
of  his  countrymen  as  the  preserver  of  their  common 
wealth.  This  reverence  has  grown  with  the  lapse  of 
time  and  the  accumulation  of  evidence.  It  is  blended 
with  a  peculiar  affection,  seldom  bestowed ,  upon  the 
memory  of  statesmen.  It  is  shared  to-day  by  many 
who  remember  with  no  less  affection  how  their  own 
fathers  fought  against  him.  He  died  with  every 
circumstance  of  tragedy,  yet  it  is  not  the  accident  of  his 
death  but  the  purpose  of  his  life  that  is  remembered. 

Readers  of  history  in  another  country  cannot  doubt 
that  the  praise  so  given  is  rightly  given  ;  yet  any  bare 
record  of  the  American  Civil  War  may  leave  them 
wondering  why  it  has  been  so  unquestioningly  accorded. 
The  position  and  task  of  the  American  President  in 
that  crisis  cannot  be  understood  from  those  of  other 
historic  rulers  or  historic  leaders  of  a  people  ;  and  it 
may  seem  as  if,  after  that  tremendous  conflict  in  which 
there  was  no  lack  of  heroes,  some  perverse  whim  had 
made  men  single  out  for  glory  the  puzzled  civil  magistrate 
who  sat  by.  Thus  when  an  English  writer  tells  again 
this  tale,  which  has  been  well  told  already  and  in  which 
there  can  remain  no  important  new  facts  to  disclose, 
he  must  endeavour  to  make  clear  to  Englishmen 
circumstances  and  conditions  which  are  familiar  to 
Americans.  He  will  incur  the  certainty  that  here  and 
there  his  own  perspective  of  American  affairs  and 
persons  will  be  false,  or  his  own  touch  unsympathetic. 


2  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

He  had  better  do  this  than  chronicle  sayings  and  doings 
which  to  him  and  to  those  for  whom  he  writes  have 
no  significance.  Nor  should  the  writer  shrink  too 
timidly  from  the  display  of  a  partisanship  which,  on 
one  side  or  the  other,  it  would  be  insensate  not  to  feel. 
The  true  obligation  of  impartiality  is  that  he  should 
conceal  no  fact  which,  in  his  own  mind,  tells  against 
his  views. 

Abraham  Lincoln,  sixteenth  President  of  the  United 
States  of  America,  was  born  on  February  12,  1809,  in 
a  log  cabin  on  a  barren  farm  in  the  backwoods  of 
Kentucky,  about  three  miles  west  of  a  place  called 
Hodgensville  in  what  is  now  La  Rue  County. 

/Fifty  years  later  when  he  had  been  nominated  for 
the  Presidency  he  was  asked  for  material  for  an  account 
of  his  early  life.  "  Why,"  he  said,  "  it  is  a  great  folly 
to  attempt  to  make  anything  out  of  me  or  my  early  life. 
It  can  all  be  condensed  into  a  single  sentence  ;  and 
that  sentence  you  will  find  in  Gray's  6  Elegy  '  :  — 


"  '  The  short  and  simple  annals  of  the 

That's  my  life,  and  that's  all  you  or  anyone  else  can 
make  out  of  it.^  His  other  references  to  early  days 
were  rare.  He  would  repeat  queer  reminiscences  of  the 
backwoods  to  illustrate  questions  of  state  ;  but  of  his 
own  part  in  that  old  life  he  spoke  reluctantly  and  sadly. 
Nevertheless  there  was  once  extracted  from  him  an 
awkward  autobiographical  fragment,  and  his  friends 
have  collected  and  recorded  concerning  his  earlier 
years  quite  as  much  as  is  common  in  great  men's 
biographies  or  can  as  a  rule  be  reproduced  with  its  true 
associations.  Thus  there  are  tales  enough  of  the 
untaught  student's  perseverance,  and  of  the  boy  giant's 
gentleness  and  prowess  ;  tales,  too,  more  than  enough  in 
proportion,  of  the  fun  which  varied  but  did  not  pervade 
his  existence,  and  of  the  yoking  rustic's  occasional  and 
somewhat  oafish  pranks,  j^ut,  in  any  conception  we 
may  form  as  to  the  growth  of  his  mind  and  character, 
this  fact  must  have  its  place,  that  to  the  man  himself 
the  thought  of  his  early  life  was  unattractive,  void  of 


BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN  3 

self-content  over  the  difficulties  which  he  had  conquered, 
and  void  of  romantic  fondness  for  vanished  joys  of 
youthT\ 

Mucn  the  same  may  be  said  of  his  ancestry  and 
family  connections.  Contempt  for  lowly  beginnings, 
abhorrent  as  it  is  to  any  honest  mind,  would  to  Lincoln's 
mind  have  probably  been  inconceivable,  but  he  lacked 
that  interest  in  ancestry  which  is  generally  marked  in 
his  countrymen,  and  from  talk  of  his  nearer  progenitors 
he  seems  to  have  shrunk  with  a  positive  sadness  of 
which  some  causes  will  soon  be  apparent??  Since  his 
death  it  has  been  ascertained  that  in  16380^  Samuel 
Lincoln  of  Norwich  emigrated  to  Massachusetts.  Descent 
from  him  could  be  claimed  by  a  prosperous  family  in 
Virginia,  several  of  whom  fought  on  the  Southern  side 
in  the  Civil  War.  One  Abraham  Lincoln,  grandfather 
of  the  President  and  apparently  a  grandson  of  Samuel, 
crossed  the  mountains  from  Virginia  in  1780  and  settled 
his  family  in  Kentucky,  of  which  the  nearer  portions 
had  recently  been  explored.  One  morning  four  years 
later  he  was  at  work  near  his  cabin  with  Mordecai, 
Josiah,  and  Thomas,  his  sons,  when  a  shot  from  the 
bushes  near  by  brought  him  down.  Mordecai  ran  to 
the  house,  Josiah  to  a  fort,  which  was  close  to  them. 
Thomas,  aged  six,  stayed  by  his  father's  body.  Mor 
decai  seized  a  gun  and,  looking  through  the  window,  saw 
an  Indian  in  war  paint  stooping  to  pick  up  Thomas. 
He  fired  and  killed  the  savage,  and,  when  Thomas  had 
run  into  the  cabin,  continued  firing  at  others  who 
appeared  among  the  bushes.  Shortly  Josiah  returned 
with  soldiers  from  the  fort,  and  the  Indians  ran  off, 
leaving  Abraham  the  elder  dead.  Mordecai,  his  heir- 
at-law,  prospered.  We  hear  of  him  long  after  as  an  old 
man  of  substance  and  repute  in  Western  Illinois.  He 
had  decided  views  about  Indians.  The  sight  of  a  red 
skin  would  move  him  to  strange  excitement ;  he  would 
disappear  into  the  bushes  with  his  gun,  and  his  conscience 
as  a  son  and  a  sportsman  would  not  be  satisfied  till  he 
had  stalked  and  shot  him.  We  are  further  informed 
that  he  was  a  "  good  old  man."  Josiah  also  moved  to 


B3 


4  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Illinois,  and  it  is  pleasant  to  learn  that  he  also  was  a 
good  old  man,  and,  as  became  a  good  old  man,  prospered 
pretty  well.  But  President  Lincoln  and  his  sister  knew 
neither  these  excellent  elders  nor  any  other  of  their 
father's  kin. 

And   those  with  whom   the   story  of  his   own   first 
twenty-one  years  is  bound  up  invite  almost  as  summary 
treatment.     Thomas  Lincoln  never  prospered  like  Mor- 
decai  and  Josiah,  and  never   seems   to   have  left   the 
impress  of  his  goodness  or  of  anything  else  on  any  man. 
But,   while   learning   to   carpenter   under   one    Joseph 
Hanks,  he  married  his  employer's  niece  Nancy,  and  by 
her  became  the  father  first  of  a  daughter  Sarah,  and 
four  years  later,  at  the  farm  near  Hodgensville  afore 
said,  of  Abraham,  the  future  President.     In  1816,  after 
several  migrations,  he  transported  his  household  down  the 
Ohio  to  a  spot  on  the  Indiana  shore,  near  which  the 
village  of  Gentryville  soon  sprang  up.     There  he  abode 
till  Abraham  was  nearly  twenty-one.     When  the  boy 
was  eight  his  mother  died,  leaving  him  in  his  sister's 
care  ;  but  after  a  year  or  so  Thomas  went  back  alone 
to  Kentucky  and,  after  brief  wooing,  brought  back  a 
wife,  Sarah,  the  widow  of  one  Mr.  Johnston,  whom  he 
had   courted    vainly    before    her    first    marriage.      He 
brought  with  her  some  useful  additions  to  his  household 
gear,    and    her    rather    useless    son    John    Johnston. 
Relatives  of  Abraham's  mother  and  other  old  neighbours 
— in  particular  John  and  Dennis  Hanks — accompanied 
all  the  family's  migrations.     Ultimately,  in  1830,  they 
all  moved  further  west  into  Illinois.   Meanwhile  Abraham 
from  an  early  age  did  such  various  tasks  for  his  father 
or  for  neighbouring  farmers  as  from  time  to  time  suited 
'the  father.     When  an  older  lad  he  was  put  for  a  while 
in  charge  of  a  ferry  boat,  and  this  led  to  the  two  great 
adventures  of  his  early  days,  voyages  with  a  cargo  boat 
and  two  mates  down  by  river  to  New  Orleans.     The 
second    and    more    memorable    of   these    voyages   was 
just  after  the  migration  to  Illinois.      He  returned  from 
it  to  a  place  called  New  Salem,  in  Illinois,  some  distance 
from  his  father's  new  farm,  in  expectation  of  work  in 


BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN  5 

a  store  which  was  about  to  be  opened.  Abraham,  by 
this  time,  was  of  age,  and  in  accordance  with  custom  had 
been  set  free  to  shift  for  himself. 

Each  of  these  migrations  was  effected  with  great 
labour  in  transportation  of  baggage  (sometimes  in 
home-made  boats),  clearing  of  timber,  and  building ; 
and  Thomas  Lincoln  cannot  have  been  wanting  in  the 
capacity  for  great  exertions.  But  historians  have  been 
inclined  to  be  hard  on  him.  He  seems  to  have  been 
without  sustained  industry  ;  in  any  case  he  had  not 
much  money  sense  and  could  not  turn  his  industry  to 
much  account.  Some  hint  that  he  drank,  but  it  is 
admitted  that  most  Kentucky  men  drank  more.  There 
are  indications  that  he  was  a  dutiful  but  ineffective 

•father,  chastising  not  too  often  or  too  much,  but  generally 
on  the  wrong  occasion.  He  was  no  scholar  and  did  not 
encourage  his  son  that  way  ;  but  he  had  a  great  liking 
for  stories.  He  was  of  a  peaceable  and  inoffensive 
temper,  but  on  great  provocation  would  turn  on  a  bully 
with  surprising  and  dire  consequences.  Old  Thomas, 
after  Abraham  was  turned  loose,  continued  a  migrant, 
always  towards  a  supposed  better  farm  further  west, 
always  with  a  mortgage  on  him.  Abraham,  when  he 
was  a  struggling  professional  man,  helped  him  with 
money  as  well  as  he  could.  We  have  his  letter  to  the 
old  man  on  his  death-bed,  a  letter  of  genuine  but  mild 
affection  with  due  words  of  piety.  He  explains  that 
illness  in  his  own  household  makes  it  impossible  for  him 
to  pay  a  last  visit  to  his  father,  and  then,  with  that 
curious  directness  which  is  common  in  the  families  of 
the  poor  and  has  as  a  rule  no  sting,  he  remarks  that 
an  interview,  if  it  had  been  possible,  might  have  given 

^more  pain  than  pleasure  to  both.  Everybody  has 
insisted  from  the  first  how  little  Abraham  took  after  his 
father,  but  more  than  one  of  the  traits  attributed  to 
Tl^nas  will  certainly  reappear. 

^TDraham,  as  a  man,  when  for  once  he  spoke  of  his 
mother,  whom  he  very  seldom  mentioned,  spoke  with 
intense  feeling  for  her  motherly  care.  "  I  owe,"  he 
said,  "  everything  that  I  am  to  her."  It  pleased  him 


6  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

in  this  talk  to  explain  by  inheritance  from  her  the 
mental  qualities  which  distinguished  him  from  the 
house  of  Lincoln,  and  from  others  of  the  house  of  HanEsl 
She  was,  he  said,  the  illegitimate  daughter  of  a  Virginian 
gentleman,  whose  name  he  did  not  know,  but  from 
whom  as  he  guessed  the  peculiar  gifts,  of  which  he  could 
not  fail  to  be  conscious,  were  derived. 

Sarahjhis  sister )  was  married  at  Gentryville  to  one 
Mr.  Grigsby.  The  Grigsbys  were  rather  great  people, 
as  people  went  in  Gentryville.  It  is  said  to  have 
become  fixed  in  the  boy's  mind  that  the  Grigsbys  had 
not  treated  Sarah  well ;  and  this  was  the  beginning  of 
certain  woes. 

Sarah  Bush  Lincoln,  his  stepmother,  was  good  to  him 
and  he  to  her.  Above  all  she  encouraged  him  in  his* 
early  studies,  to  which  a  fretful  housewife  could  have 
opposed  such  terrible  obstacles.  She  lived  to  hope 
that  he  might  not  be  elected  President  for  fear  that 
enemies  should  kill  him,  and  she  lived  to  have  her  fear 
fulfilled.  His  affectionate  care  over  her  continued  to 
the  end.  She  lived  latterly  with  her  son  John  Johnston. 
Abraham's  later  letters  to  this  companion  of  his  youth 
deserve  to  be  looked  up  in  the  eight  large  volumes 
called  his  Works,  for  it  is  hard  to  see  how  a  man  could 
speak  or  act  better  to  an  impecunious  friend  who  would 
not  face  his  own  troubles  squarely.  It  is  sad  that  the 
"  ever  your  affectionate  brother  "  of  the  earlier  letters 
declines  to  "  yours  sincerely  "  in  the  last ;  but  it  is  an 
honest  decline  of  affection,  for  the  man  had  proved  to 
be  cheating  his  mother,  and  Abraham  had  had  to 
stop  it. 

Two  of  the  cousinhood,  Dennis  Hanks,  a  character  of 
comedy,  and  John  Hanks,  the  serious  and  steady 
character  of  the  connection,  deserve  mention.  They 
and  John  Johnston  make  momentary  reappearances 
again.  Otherwise  the  whole  of  Abraham  Lincoln's 
kindred  are  now  out  of  the  story.  They  have  been 
disposed  of  thus  hastily  at  the  outset,  not  because  they 
were  discreditable  or  slight  people,  but  because  Lincoln 
himself  when  he  began  to  find  his  footing  in  the  world 


BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN  7 

seems  to  have  felt  sadly  that  his  family  was  just  so 
much  to  him  and  no  more.  The  dearest  of  his  recollec 
tions  attached  to  premature  death  ;  the  next  to  chronic 
failure.  Rightly  or  wrongly  (and  we  know  enough  about 
heredity  now  to  expect  any  guess  as  to  its  working  in  a 
particular  case  to  be  wrong)  he  attributed  the  best 
that  he  had  inherited  to  a  licentious  connection  and  a 
nameless  progenitor.  Quite  early  he  must  have  been 
intensely  ambitious,  and  discovered  in  himself  in 
tellectual  power ;  but  from  his  twelfth  year  to  his 
twenty-first  there  was  hardly  a  soul  to  comprehend 
that  side  of  him.  This  chill  upon  his  memory  un 
mistakably  influenced  the  particular  complexion  of 
his  melancholy.  Unmistakably  too  he  early  learnt  to 
think  that  he  was  .odd,  that  his  oddity  was  con 
nected  with  his  strength,  that  he  might  be  destined  to 
stand  alone  and  capable  of  so  standing. 

The  life  of  the  farming  pioneer  in  what  was  then  the 
Far  West  afforded  a  fair  prospect  of  laborious  inde 
pendence.  But  at  least  till  Lincoln  was  grown  up, 
when  a  time  of  rapid  growth  and  change  set  in,  it  offered 
no  hope  of  quickly  gotten  wealth,  and  it  imposed  severe 
hardship  on  all.  The  country  was  thickly  wooded  ; 
the  settler  had  before  him  at  the  outset  heavy  toil  in 
clearing  the  ground  and  in  building  some  rude  shelter, 
— a  house  or  just  a  "  half -faced  camp,"  that  is,  a  shed 
with  one  side  open  to  the  weather  such  as  that  in  which 
the  Lincoln  family  passed  their  first  winter  near  Gentry- 
ville.  The  site  once  chosen  and  the  clearing  once 
made,  there  was  no  such  ease  of  cultivation  or  such 
certain  fertility  as  later  settlers  found  yet  further  West 
when  the  development  of  railways,  of  agricultural 
machinery,  and  of  Eastern  or  European  markets  had 
opened  out  to  cultivation  the  enormous  stretches  of 
level  grass  plain  beyond  the  Mississippi. 

Till  population  had  grown  a  good  deal,  pioneer  families 
were  largely  occupied  in  producing  for  themselves  with 
their  own  hands  what,  in  their  hardy  if  not  always 
frugal  view,  were  the  necessities  and  comforts  of  life. 
They  had  no  Eastern  market  for  their  produce,  for 


8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

railways  did  not  begin  to  be  made  till  1840,  and  it  was 
many  years  before  they  crossed  the  Eastern  mountains. 
An  occasional  cargo  was  taken  on  a  flat-bottomed  boat 
down  the  nearest  creek,  as  a  stream  is  called  in  America, 
into  the  Ohio  and  so  by  the  innumerable  windings  of  the 
Mississippi  to  New  Orleans  ;   but  no  return  cargo  could 
be  brought  up  stream.     Knives  and  axes  were  the  most 
precious  objects  t6  be  gained  by  trade  ;  woollen  fabrics 
were  rare  in  the  West,  when  Lincoln  was  born,  and  the 
white  man  and  woman,  like  the  red  whom  they  had 
displaced,    were    chiefly    dressed    in    deer    skins.     The 
woods  abounded  in  game,  and  in  the  early  stages  of  the 
development  of  the  West  a  man  could  largely  support 
himself  by  his  gun.     The  cold  of  every  winter  is  there 
great,  and  an  occasional  winter  made  itself  long  re 
membered,  like    the    "  winter  of   the    deep   snow "   in 
Illinois,  by  the  havoc  of  its  sudden  onset  and  the  suffering 
of  its  long  duration.     The  settling  of  a  forest  country 
was  accompanied  here  as  elsewhere  by  the  occasional 
ravages  of  strange  and  destructive  pestilences  and  the 
constant   presence    of   malaria.     Population   was   soon 
thick   enough   for    occasional   gatherings,  convivial    or 
religious,  and  in  either  case  apt  to  be  wild,  but  for  long 
it  was  not  thick  enough  for  the  life  of  most  settlers  to  be 
other  than  lonely  as  well  as  hard. 

Abraham  Lincoln  in  his  teens  grew  very  fast,  and 
by  nineteen  he  was  nearly  six  foot  four.  His  weight 
was  never  quite  proportionate  to  this.  His  ungainly 
figure,  with  long  arms  and  large  hands  and  relatively 
small  development  of  chest,  and  the  strange  deep-cut 
lineaments  of  his  face  were  perhaps  the  evidence  of 
unfit  (sometimes  insufficient)  food  in  these  years  of 
growth.  But  his  muscular  strength  was  great,  and 
startling  statistical  tales  are  told  of  the  weight  he  could 
lift  and  the  force  of  his  blows  with  a  mallet  or  an  axe. 
To  a  gentle  and  thoughtful  boy  with  secret  ambition 
in  him  such  strength  is  a  great  gift,  and  in  such  surround 
ings  most  obviously  so.  Lincoln  as  a  lad  was  a  valuable 
workman  at  the  varied  tasks  that  came  his  way,  without 
needing  that  intense  application  _tp  manual  pursuits 


BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN  9 

which   the   bent   of  his   mind   made   irksome   to   him. 
And  he  was  a  person  of  high  consideration  among  the 
lads   of  his  age   and   company.     The   manners   of  the 
people  then  settling  in  Indiana  and  Illinois  had  not  the 
extreme  ferocity  for  which  Kentucky  had  earlier  been 
famous,  and  which  crops  up  here  and  there  in  frontier 
life  elsewhere.     All  the   same,   as   might  naturally  be 
supposed,  they  shared  Plato's  opinion  that  youths  and 
men  in  the  prime  of  life  should  settle  their  differences  with 
their  fists.     Young  Lincoln's  few  serious  combats  were 
satisfactorily  decisive,  and  neither  they  nor  his  friendly 
wrestling  bouts  ended  in  the  quarrels  which  were  too 
common  among  his  neighbours.     Thus,  for  all  his  origi 
nality  and  oddity,  he  early  grew  accustomed  to  mix  in 
the  sort  of  company  he  was  likely  to  meet,  without  either 
inward  shrinking  or  the  need  of  conscious  self-assertion. 
fiji  one  thing  he  stood  aloof  from  the  sports  of  his 
fellows.     Most  backwoodsmen  were  bred  to  the  gun  ; 
he  has  told  us  that  he  shot  a  turkey  when  he  was  eight 
and  never  afterwards  shot  at  all.     There  is  an  early  tale 
of  his   protests   against  an  aimless   slaughter   of  mud 
turtles  ;    and  it  may  be  guessed  that  the  dislike  of  all 
killing,  which  gave  him  sore  trouble  later,  began  when'; 
he  was  youngTl  Tales  survive  of  his  kindness  to  helpless 
men  and  animals/    It  marks  the  real  hardness  of  his 
surroundings,  and  their  hardening  effect  on  many,  that 
his  exertions  in  saving  a  drunken  man  from  death  in 
the   snow  are   related  with   apparent   surprise.     Some 
tales  of  his  helping  a  pig  stuck  in  a  bog  or  a  dog  on  an 
ice  floe  and  the  like  seem  to  indicate  a  curious  and  lasting 
trait.     These  things  seem  not  to  have  been  done  spon 
taneously,  but  on  mature  reflection  after  he  had  passed 
unheeding  by.     He  grew  to  be  a  man  of  prompt  action 
in  circumstances  of  certain  kinds  ;    but  generally  his 
impulse  was  slow  and  not  very  sure.     Taste  and  the  i 
minor  sensibilities  were  a  little   deficient  in  him.     As  ;| 
a   lady  once   candidly  explained   to   him,   he   was   not 
ready  with   little   gracious    acts.      But   rare  occasions, 
such  as  can  arouse  a  passionate  sense  of  justice,  would 
kindle  his  slow,  kind  nature  with  a  sudden  fire. 


io  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

The  total  amount  of  his  schooling,  at  the  several  brief 
periods  for  which  there  happened  to  have  been  a  school 
accessible  and  facility  to  get  to  it,  was  afterwards 
computed  by  himself  at  something  under  twelve  months. 
With  this  slight  help  distributed  over  the  years  from  his 
eighth  to  his  fifteenth  birthday  he  taught  himself  to 
read,  write,  and  do  sums.  The  stories  of  the  effort  and 
painful  shifts,  by  which  great  men  accomplish  this 
initial  labour  almost  unhelped,  have  in  all  cases  the  same 
pathos,  and  have  a  certain  sameness  in  detail.  Having 
learnt  to  read  he  had  the  following  books  within  his 
reach:  the  Bible,  "  ^Esop's  Fables,"  "Robinson 
Crusoe,"  the  "  Pilgrim's  Progress,"  a  "  History  of  the 
United  States,"  and  Weems'  "  Life  of  Washington." 
Later  on  the  fancy  took  him  to  learn  the  laws  of  his 
State,  and  he  obtained  the  "  Laws  of  Indiana."  These 
books  he  did  read,  and  read  again,  and  pondered,  not 
with  any  dreamy  or  purely  intellectual  interest,  but 
like  one  who  desires  the  weapon  of  learning  for  practical 
ends,  and  desires  also  to  have  patterns  of  what  life  should 
be.  As  already  said,  his  service  as  a  labourer  could  be 
considerable,  and  when  something  stirred  his  ambition 
to  do  a  task  quickly  his  energy  could  be  prodigious. 
But  "  bone  idle  is  what  I  called  him,"  was  the  verdict 
long  after  of  one,  perhaps  too  critical,  employer. 
"  I  found  him,"  he  said,  "  cocked  up  on  a  haystack 
with  a  book.  'What  are  you  reading  ?  '  I  said. 
'  I'm  not  reading,  I'm  studying,'  says  he.  '  What  are 
you  studying  ?  '  says  I.  '  Law,'  says  he,  as  proud  as 
Cicero.  *  Great  God  Almighty !  '  said  I."  The  boy's 
correction,  "  studying  "  for  u  reading,"  was  impertinent, 
but  probably  sound.  To  be  equally  sound,  we  must 
reckon  among  his  educational  facilities  the  abundant 
stories  which  came  his  way  in  a  community  which, 
however  unlettered,  was  certainly  not  dull-spirited  ;  the 
occasional  newspaper ;  the  rare  lectures  or  political 
meetings  ;  the  much  more  frequent  religious  meetings, 
with  preachers  who  taught  a  grim  doctrine,  but  who 
preached  with  vigour  and  sometimes  with  the  deepest 
sincerity  ;  the  hymns  often  of  great  emotional  power 


BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN  n 

over  a  simple  congregation — Cowper's  "  There  is  a 
fountain  filled  with  blood,"  is  one  recorded  favourite 
among  them  ;  the  songs,  far  other  than  hymns,  which 
Dennis  Hanks  and  his  other  mates  would  pick  up  or 
compose  ;  and  the  practice  in  rhetoric  and  the  art  of 
exposition,  which  he  unblushingly  afforded  himself 
before  audiences  of  fellow  labourers  who  welcomed  the 
jest  and  the  excuse  for  stopping  work.  The  achievement 
of  the  self-taught  man  remains  wonderful,  but,  if  he 
surmounts  his  difficulties  at  alLsome  of  his  limitations 
may  turn  to  sheer  advantage.  /There  is  some  advantage 
merely  in  being  driven  to  make  the  most  of  few  books  ; 
great  advantage  in  having  one's  choice  restricted  by 
circumstances  to  good  books  ;  great  advantage  too  in 
the  consciousness  of  untrained  faculty  which  leaves  a 
man  capable  in  mature  life  of  deliberately  undertaking 
mental  discipline? 

Along  with 'the  legends  and  authentic  records  of  his 
self-training,  signs  of  an  ambition  which  showed  itself 
early  and  which  was  from  the  first  a  clean  and  a  high 
ambition,  there  are  also  other  legends  showing  Lincoln 
as  a  naughty  boy  among  naughty  boys.  The  selection  / 
here  made  from  these  lacks  refinement,  and  the  reader 
must  note  that  this  was  literally  a  big,  naughty  boy,  not 
a  man  who  had  grown  stiff  in  coarseness  and  ill-nature. 
First  it  must  be  recalled  that  Abraham  bore  a  grudge 
against  the  Grigsbys,  an  honourable  grudge  in  its 
origin  and  perhaps  the  only  grudge  he  ever  bore.  There 
had  arisen  from  this  a  combat,  of  which  the  details 
might  displease  the  fastidious,  but  which  was  noble  in 
so  far  that  Abraham  rescued  a  weaker  combatant  who 
was  overmatched.  But  there  ensued  something  more 
displeasing,  a  series  of  lampoons  by  Abraham,  in  prose 
and  a  kind  of  verse.  These  were  gross  and  silly  enough, 
though  probably  to  the  taste  of  the  public  which  he 
then  addressed,  but  it  is  the  sequel  that  matters.  In  a 
work  called  "  The  First  Chronicles  of  Reuben,"  it  is 
related  how  Reuben  and  Josiah,  the  sons  of  Reuben 
Grigsby  the  elder,  took  to  themselves  wives  on  the  same 
day.  By  local  custom  the  bridal  feast  took  place  and 


12  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  two  young  couples  began  their  married  careers 
under  the  roof  of  the  bridegrooms'  father.  Moreover,  it 
was  the  custom  that,  at  a  certain  stage  in  the  cele 
brations,  the  brides  should  be  escorted  to  their  chambers 
by  hired  attendants  who  shortly  after  conducted  the 
bridegrooms  thither.  On  this  occasion  some  sense  of 
mischief  afoot  disturbed  the  heart  of  Mrs.  Reuben 
Grigsby  the  elder,  and,  hastening  upstairs,  just  after 
the  attendants  had  returned,  she  cried  out  in  a  loud 
voice  and  to  the  great  consternation  of  all  concerned, 
"  Why,  Reuben,  you're  in  bed  with  the  wrong  wife  !  " 
The  historian  who,  to  the  manifest  annoyance  of 
Lincoln's  other  biographers,  has  preserved  this  and 
much  other  priceless  information,  infers  that  Abraham, 
who  was  not  invited  to  the  feast,  had  plotted  this 
domestic  catastrophe  and  won  over  the  attendants  to 
his  evil  purpose.  This  is  not  a  certain  inference,  nor  is 
it  absolutely  beyond  doubt  that  the  event  recorded  in 
"  The  First  Chronicles  of  Reuben  "  ever  happened  at  all. 
What  is  certain  is  that  these  Chronicles  themselves, 
composed  in  what  purports  to  be  the  style  of  Scripture, 
were  circulated  for  the  joint  edification  of  the  proud 
race  of  Grigsby  and  of  their  envious  neighbours  in  the 
handwriting  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  then  between  seventeen 
and  eighteen.  Not  without  reason  does  an  earlier 
manuscript  of  the  same  author  conclude,  after  several 
correct  exercises  in  compound  subtraction,  with  the 
distich : — 

"Abraham  Lincoln,  his  hand  and  pen, 
He  will  be  good,  but  God  knows  when." 

Not  to  be  too  solemn  about  a  tale  which  has  here 
been  told  for  the  whimsical  fancy  of  its  unseemliness  and 
because  it  is  probably  the  worst  that  there  is  to  tell, 
we  may  here  look  forward  and  face  the  well-known  fact 
that  the  unseemliness  in  talk  of  rough,  rustic  boys 
flavoured  the  great  President's  conversation  through 
life.  It  is  well  to  be  plain  about  this.  Lincoln  was 
quite  without  any  elegant  and  sentimental  dissoluteness, 
such  as  can  be  attractively  portrayed.  His  life  was 


BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN  13 

austere  and  seems  to  have  been  so  from  the  start.  He 
had  that  shy  reverence  for  womanhood  which  is  some 
times  acquired  as  easily  in  rough  as  in  polished  surround 
ings  and  often  quite  as  steadily  maintained.  The 
testimony  of  his  early  companions,  along  with  some  frag 
ments  of  the  boy's  feeble  but  sincere  attempts  at  verse, 
shows  that  he  acquired  it  young.  But  a  large  part  of  the 
stories  and  pithy  sayings  for  which  he  was  famous 
wherever  he  went,  but  of  which  when  their  setting  is 
lost  it  is  impossible  to  recover  the  enjoyment,  were 
undeniably  coarse,  and  naturally  enough  this  fact  was 
jarring  to  some  of  those  in  America  who  most  revered 
him.  It  should  not  really  be  hard,  in  any  comprehensive 
view  of  his  character  and  the  circumstances  in  which 
it  unfolded  itself,  to  trace  in  this  bent  of  his  humour 
something  not  discordant  with  the  widening  sympathy 
and  deepening  tenderness  of  his  nature.  The  words  of 
his  political  associate  in  Illinois,  Mr.  Leonard  Swett, 
afterwards  Attorney-General  of  the  United  States,  may 
suffice.  He  writes  :  "  Almost  any  man,  who  will  tell 
a  very  vulgar  story,  has,  in  a  degree,  a  vulgar  mind. 
But  it  was  not  so  with  him  ;  with  all  his  purity  of 
character  and  exalted  morality  and  sensibility,  which 
no  man  can  doubt,  when  hunting  for  wit  he  had  no 
ability  to  discriminate  between  the  vulgar  and  refined 
substances  from  which  he  extracted  it.  It  was  the 
wit  he  was  after,  the  pure  jewel,  and  he  would  pick 
it  up  out  of  the  mud  or  dirt  just  as  readily  as  from  a 
parlour  table."  In  any  case  his  best  remembered 
utterances  of  this  order,  when  least  fit  for  print,  were 
both  wise  and  incomparably  witty,  and  in  any  case 
they  did  not  prevent  grave  gentlemen,  who  marvelled 
at  them  rather  uncomfortably,  from  receiving  the  deep 
impression  of  what  they  called  his  pure-mindedness. 

One  last  recollection  of  Lincoln's  boyhood  has 
appealed,  beyond  any  other,  to  some  of  his  friends  as 
prophetic  of  things  to  come.  Mention  has  already 
been  made  of  his  two  long  trips  down  the  Mississippi. 
With  the  novel  responsibilities  which  they  threw  on 
him,  and  the  novel  sights  and  company  which  he  met 


i4  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

all  the  way  to  the  strange,  distant  city  of  New  Orleans, 
they  must  have  been  great  experiences.  Only  two 
incidents  of  them  are  recorded.  In  the  first  voyage 
he  and  his  mates  had  been  disturbed  at  night  by  a 
band  of  negro  marauders  and  had  had  a  sharp  fight  in 
repelling  them,  but  in  the  second  voyage  he  met  with 
the  negro  in  a  way  that  to  him  was  more  memorable. 
He  and  the  young  fellows  with  him  saw,  among  the 
sights  of  New  Orleans,  negroes  chained,  maltreated, 
whipped  and  scourged  ;  they  came  in  their  rambles 
upon  a  slave  auction  where  a  fine  mulatto  girl  was 
being  pinched  and  prodded  and  trotted  up  and  down 
the  room  like  a  horse  to  show  how  she  moved,  that 
"  bidders  might  satisfy  themselves,"  as  the  auctioneer 
said,  of  the  soundness  of  the  article  to  be  sold.  John 
Johnston  and  John  Hanks  and  Abraham  Lincoln  saw 
these  sights  with  the  unsophisticated  eyes  of  honest 
country  lads  from  a  free  State.  In  their  home  circle 
it  seems  that  slavery  was  always  spoken  of  with 
horror.  One  of  them  had  a  tenacious  memory  and  a 
tenacious  will.  "  Lincoln  saw  it,"  John  Hanks  said 
long  after,  and  other  men's  recollections  of  Lincoln's 
talk  confirmed  him  —  "  Lincoln  saw  it  ;  his  heart  bled  ; 
said  nothing  much,  was  silent.  I  can  say,  knowing  it, 
that  it  was  on  this  trip  that  he  formed  his  opinion  of 
slavery.  It  ran  its  iron  into  him  then  and  there,  May, 
1831.  I  have  heard  him  say  so  often."  Perhaps  in 
other  talks  old  John  Hanks  dramatised  his  early 
remembrances  a  little  ;  he  related  how  at  the  slave 
auction  Lincoln  said,  "  By  God,  boys,  let's  get  away 
from  this.  If  ever  I  get  a  chance  to  hit  that  thing,  I'll 
hit  it  hard." 

The  youth,  who  probably  did  not  express  his  indig 
nation  in  these  prophetic  words,  was  in  fact  chosen  to 
deal  "  that  thing  "  a  blow  from  which  it  seems  unlikely 
to  recover  as  a  permitted  institution  among  civilised 
men,  and  it  is  certain  that  from  this  early  time  the 
thought  of  slavery  never  ceased  to  be  hateful  to  him. 
it  is  not  in  the  light  of  a  crusader  against  this  special 


evil  that  we  are  to  regard  hinit]    When  he  came  back 


BOYHOOD  OF  LINCOLN  15 

from  this  voyage  to  his  new  home  in  Illinois  he  was 
simply  a  youth  ambitious  of  an  honourable  part  in  the 
life  of  the  young  country  of  which  he  was  proud.  We 
may  regard,  and  he  himself  regarded,  the  liberation  of 
the  slaves,  which  will  always  be  associated  with  his 
name,  as  a  part  of  a  larger  work,  the  restoration  of  his 
country  to  its  earliest  and  noblest  tradition,  which 
alone  gave  permanence  or  worth  to  its  existence  as  a 
nation. 


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bet 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION 

I .  The  Formation  of  a  National  Government. 

IT  is  of  course  impossible  to  understand  the  life  of  a 
politician  in  another  country  without  study  of  its 
conditions  and  its  past.  In  the  case  of  America  this 
study  is  especially  necessary,  not  only  because  the 
many  points  of  comparison  between  that  country  and 
our  own  are  apt  to  conceal  profound  differences  of 
customs  and  institutions,  but  because  the  broader 
difference  between  a  new  country  and  an  old  is  in 
many  respects  more  important  than  we  conceive. 
But  in  the  case  of  Lincoln  there  is  peculiar  reason  for 
carrying  such  a  study  far  back.  Hejiim^eil_ap.pealed 
^unceasingly  to  a  tradition  of.:tfLe_jpas±*  In  tracing  the 
causes  which  up  to  his  time  had  tended  to  conjoin  the 
United  States  more  closely  and  the  cause  which  more 
recently  had  begun  to  threaten  them  with  disruption, 
we  shall  be  examining  the  elements  of  the  problem 
with  which  it  was  his  work  in  life  to  deal. 

The  "  Thirteen  United  States  of  America  "  which  in 
1776  declared  their  independence  of  Great  Britain  were 
so  many  distinct  Colonies  distributed  unevenly  along 
1,300  miles  of  the  Atlantic  coast.  These  thirteen 
Colonies  can  easily  be  identified  on  the  map  when  it  is 
explained  that  Maine  in  the  extreme  north  was  then  an 
unsettled  forest  tract  claimed  by  the  Colony  of  Massa 
chusetts,  that  Florida  in  the  extreme  south  belonged  to 
Spain,  and  that  Vermont,  which  soon  after  asserted  its 
separate  existence,  was  a  part  of  the  State  of  New  York. 
Almost  every  one  of  these  Colonies  had  its  marked 
peculiarities  and  its  points  of  antagonism  as  against  its 
nearest  neighbours  ;  but  they  fell  into  three  groups. 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    17 

We  may  broadly  contrast  the  five  southernmost,  which 
included  those  which  were  the  richest  and  of  which  in 
many  ways  the  leading  State  was  Virginia,  with  the 
four  (or  later  six)  northernmost  States  known  collectively 
as  New  England.  Both  groups  had  at  first  been 
colonised  by  the  same  class,  the  smaller  landed  gentry 
of  England  with  a  sprinkling  of  well-to-do  traders, 
though  the  South  received  later  a  larger  number  of 
poor  and  shiftless  immigrants  than  the  North,  and  the 
North  attracted  a  larger  number  of  artisans.  The 
physical  conditions  of  the  South  led  to  the  growth  of 
large  farms,  or  "  plantations  "  as  they  were  called,  and 
of  a  class  of  large  proprietors  ;  negro  slaves  thrived 
there  and  were  useful  in  the  cultivation  of  tobacco, 
indigo,  rice,  and  later  of  cotton.  The  North  continued 
to  be  a  country  of  small  farms,  but  its  people  turned 
also  to  fishery  and  to  commerce,  and  the  sea  carrying 
trade  became  early  its  predominant  interest,  yielding 
place  later  on  to  manufacturing  industries.  The  South 
was  attached  in  the  main,  though  by  no  means  altogether, 
to  the  Church  of  England  ;  New  England  owed  its 
origin  to  successive  immigrations  of  Puritans  often 
belonging  to  the  Congregational  or  Independent  body  ; 
with  the  honourable  exception  of  Rhode  Island  these 
communities  showed  none  of  the  liberal  and  tolerant 
spirit  which  the  Independents  of  the  old  country  often 
developed ;  they  manifested,  however,  the  frequent 
virtues  as  well  as  the  occasional  defects  of  the  Puritan 
character.  The  middle  group  of  Colonies  were  of  more 
mixed  origin  ;  New  York  and  New  Jersey  had  been 
Dutch  possessions,  Delaware  was  partly  Swedish, 
Pennsylvania  had  begun  as  a  Quaker  settlement  but 
included  many  different  elements ;  in  physical  and 
economic  conditions  they  resembled  on  the  whole  New 
England,  but  they  lacked,  some  of  them  conspicuously, 
the  Puritan  discipline,  and  had  a  certain  cosmopolitan 
character.  Though  there  were  sharp  antagonisms 
among  the  northern  settlements,  and  the  southern 
settlements  were  kept  distinct  by  the  great  distances 
between  them,  the  tendency  of  events  was  to  soften 


1 8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

these  minor  differences.  But  it  greatly  intensified  one 
broad  distinction  which  marked  off  the  southern  group 
from  the  middle  and  the  northern  groups  equally. 

Nevertheless  before  independence  was  thought  of, 
there  were  common  characteristics  distinguishing 
Americans  from  English  people.  They  are  the  better 
worth  an  attempt  to  note  them  because,  as  a  historian 
of  America  wrote  some  years  ago,  "  the  typical  American 
of  1900  is  on  the  whole  more  like  his  ancestor  of  1775 
than  is  the  typical  Englishman."  In  all  the  Colonies 
alike  the  conditions  of  life  encouraged  personal  in 
dependence.  In  all  alike  they  also  encouraged  a  special 
kind  of  ability  which  may  be  called  practical  rather  than 
thorough — that  of  a  workman  who  must  be  competent 
at  many  tasks  and  has  neither  opportunity  nor  induce 
ment  to  become  perfect  at  one  ;  that  of  the  scientific 
man  irresistibly  drawn  to  inventions  which  shall  make 
life  less  hard ;  that  of  the  scholar  or  philosopher  who 
must  supply  the  new  community's  need  of  lawyers 
and  politicians. 

On  the  other  hand  many  of  the  colonists'  forefathers 
iad  come  to  their  new  home  with  distinct  aspirations 
for  a  better  ordering  of  human  life  than  the  old  world 
'allowed,  and  it  has  frequently  been  noticed  that 
Americans  from  the  first  have  been  more  prone  than 
their  kinsmen  in  England  to  pay  homage  to  large  ideal 
^conceptions.  This  is  a  disposition  not  entirely  favour 
able  to  painstaking  and  sure-footed  reform.  The  idealist 
American  is  perhaps  too  ready  to  pay  himself  with  fine 
words,  which  the  subtler  and  shyer  Englishman  avoids 
and  rather  too  readily  sets  down  as  insincere  in  others. 
Moreover,  this  tendency  is  quite  consistent  with  the 
peculiar  conservatism  characteristic  of  America.  New 
conditions  in  which  tradition  gave  no  guidance  called 
forth  great  inventive  powers  and  bred  a  certain  pride 
in  novelty.  An  American  economist .  has  written  in  a 
sanguine  humour,  "  The  process  of  transplanting  removes 
many  of  the  shackles  of  custom  and  tradition  which 
retard  the  progress  of  older  countries.  In  a  new 
country  things  cannot  be  done  in  the  old  way,  and  there- 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION     19 

» 

fore  they  are  probably  done  in  the  best  way."  But  a 
new  country  is  always  apt  to  cling  with  tenacity  to 
those  old  things  for  which  it  still  has  use  ;  and  a  remote 
and  undeveloped  country  does  not  fully  share  the 
continual  commerce  in  ideas  which  brings  about  change 
(and,  in  the  main,  advance)  in  the  old  world.  The 
conservatism  which  these  causes  tend  to  produce  has 
in  any  case  been  marked  in  America.  Thus,  as  readers 
of  Lowell  are  aware,  in  spite  of  the  ceaseless  efflorescence 
of  the  modern  slang  of  America,  the  language  of 
America  is  in  many  respects  that  of  an  older  England 
than  ours,  and  the  like  has  all  along  been  true  of 
important  literature,  and  still  more  of  oratory,  in 
America.  Moreover,  as  the  sentences  which  have  just 
been  quoted  may  suggest,  the  maxim  that  has  once 
hit  the  occasion,  or  the  new  practice  or  expedient  once 
necessitated  by  the  conditions  of  the  moment,  has  been 
readily  hallowed  as  expressing  the  wisdom  of  the  ages. 
An  Englishman  will  quote  Burke  as  he  would  quote 
Demosthenes  or  Plato,  but  Americans  have  been  apt  to 
quote  their  elder  statesmen  as  they  would  quote  the 
Bible.  In  like  manner  political  practices  of  accidental 
origin — for  instance,  that  a  representative  should  be  an 
inhabitant  of  the  place  he  represents — acquire  in  America 
something  like  the  force  of  constitutional  law. 

In  this  connection  we  must  recall  the  period  at  which 
the  earliest  settlers  came  from  England,  and  the  political 
heritage  which  they  consequently  brought  with  them. 
This  heritage  included  a  certain  aptitude  for  local 
government,  which  was  fostered  in  the  south  by  the 
rise  of  a  class  of  large  landowners  and  in  the  north  by 
the  Congregational  Church  system.  It  included  also  a 
great  tenacity  of  the  su^bj/ec^.jdgLhts.  as  against  the 
State — the  spirit  of  Hampden  refusing  payment  of 
ship-money — and  a  disposition  to  look  on  the  law  and 
the  Courts  as  the  bulwarks  of  such  rights  against 
Government.  But  it  did  not  include — and  this  explains 
the  real  meaning  of  the  War  of  Independence — any 
sort  of  feeling  of  allegiance  to  a  Parliament  which 
represented  Great  Britain  only,  and  which  had  gained 


20  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

its  position  even  in  Great  Britain  since  the  fathers  of 
Virginia  and  Massachusetts  left  home.  Nor  did  it 
include — and  this  was  of  great  importance  in  its  in 
fluence  on  the  form  of  the  Constitution — any  real 
understanding  of  or  any  aptitude  for  the  English 
Parliamentary  Government,  under  which  the  leaders  of 
the  legislative  body  and  the  advisers  of  the  Crown  in  its 
executive  functions  are  the  same  men,  and  under  which 
the  elected  persons,  presumed  for  the  moment  to 
represent  the  people,  are  allowed  for  that  moment  an 
almost  unfettered  supremacy. 

Thus  there  was  much  that  made  it  easy  for  the 
Colonies  to  combine  in  the  single  act  of  repudiating 
British  sovereignty,  yet  the  characteristics  which  may 
be  ascribed  to  them  in  common  were  not  such  as  in 
clined  them  or  fitted  them  to  build  up  a  great  new  unity. 

The  Colonies,  however,  backed  up  by  the  British 
Government  with  the  vigour  which  Chatham  imparted 
to  it,  had  acted  together  against  a  common  danger  from 
the  French.  When  the  States,  as  we  must  now  call 
them,  acted  together  against  the  British  Government 
they  did  so  in  name  as  "  United  States,"  and  they 
shortly  proceeded  to  draw  up  "  Articles  of  Confederation 
and  Perpetual  Union."  But  it  was  union  of  a  feeble 
kind.  The  separate  government  of  each  State,  in  its 
internal  affairs,  was  easy  to  provide  for  ;  representative 
institutions  always  existed,  and  no  more  change  was 
needed  than  to  substitute  elected  officers  for  the 
Governors  and  Councillors  formerly  appointed  by  the 
Crown.  For  the  Union  a  Congress  was  provided  which 
was  to  represent  all  the  States  in  dealings  with  the 
outside  world,  but  it  was  a  Government  with  no  effective 
powers  except  such  as  each  separate  State  might  inde 
pendently  choose  to  lend  it.  It  might  urge  war  with 
England,  but  it  could  not  effectually  control  or  regularly 
pay  the  military  service  of  its  own  citizens  ;  it  might 
make  a  treaty  of  peace  with  England,  but  it  could  not 
enforce  on  its  citizens  distasteful  obligations  of  that 
treaty.  Such  an  ill-devised  machine  would  have  worked 
well  enough  for  a  time,  if  the  Union  Government  could 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    21 

have  attached  to  itself  popular  sentiments  of  honour  and 
loyalty.  But  the  sentiments  were  not  there  ;  and  it 
worked  badly. 

When  once  we  were  reconciled  to  a  defeat  which\ 
proved  good  for  us,  it  became  a  tradition  among  English 
writers  to  venerate  the  American  Revolution.  Later 
English  historians  have  revolted  from  this  indiscriminate 
veneration.  They  insist  on  another  side  of  the  facts  : 
on  the  hopelessness  of  the  American  cause  but  for  the 
commanding  genius  of  Washington  and  his  moral 
authority,  and  for  the  command  which  France  and 
Spain  obtained  of  the  seas  ;  on  the  petty  quarrelsome 
ness  with  which  the  rights  of  the  Colonists  were  urged^ 
and  the  meanly  skilful  agitation  which  forced  on  the 
final  rupture  ;  on  the  lack  of  sustained  patriotic  effort 
during  the  war  ;  on  the  base  cruelty  and  dishonesty 
with  which  the  loyal  minority  were  persecuted  and  the 
private  rights  guaranteed  by  the  peace  ignored.  It 
does  not  concern  us  to  ascertain  the  precise  justice  in 
this  displeasing  picture  ;  no  man  now  regrets  the  main 
result  of  the  Revolution,  and  we  know  that  a  new 
country  is  a  new  country,  and  that  there  was  much  in 
the  circumstances  of  the  war  to  encourage  indiscipline 
and  ferocity.  But  the  fact  that  there  is  cause  for  such  an 
indictment  bears  in  two  ways  upon  our  present  subject. 

In  the  first  place  there  has  been  a  tendency  both  in 
England  and  in  America  to  look  at  this  history  upside 
down.  The  epoch  of  the  Revolution  and  the  Con 
stitution  has  been  regarded  as  a  heroic  age — wherein 
lived  the  elder  Brutus,  Mucius  Scaevola,  Claelia  and  the 
rest — to  be  followed  by  almost  continuous  disappoint 
ment,  disillusionment  and  decline.  A  more  pleasing 
and  more  bracing  view  is  nearer  to  the  historic  truth. 
The  faults  of  a  later  time  were  largely  survivals,  and  the 
later  history  is  largely  that  of  growth  though  in  the 
face  of  terrific  obstacles  and  many  influences  that 
favoured  decay.  The  nobility  of  the  Revolution  in  the 
eighteenth  century  may  be  rated  higher  or  lower,  but 
in  the  Civil  War,  in  which  the  elder  brothers  of  so  many 
men  now  living  bore  their  part,  the  people  of  the  North 


22  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

and  of  the  South  alike  displayed  far  more  heroic 
qualities. 

In  the  second  place  the  War  of  Independence  and  of 
the  Revolution  lacked  some  of  the  characteristics  of  other 
national  uprisings.  It  was  not  a  revolt  against  grievous 
oppression  or  against  a  wholly  foreign  domination,  but 
against  a  political  system  which  the  people  mildly 
resented  and  which  only  statesmen  felt  to  be  pernicious 
and  found  to  be  past  cure.  The  cause  appealed  to  far- 
seeing  political  aspiration  and  appealed  also  to  turbulent 
and  ambitious  spirits  and  to  whatever  was  present  of 
a  merely  revolutionary  temper,  but  the  ordinary  law- 
abiding  man  who  minded  his  own  business  was  not 
greatly  moved  one  way  or  the  other  in  his  heart. 

The  subsequent  movement  which,  in  a  few  years  after 
independence  was  secured,  gave  the  United  States  a 
national  and  a  working  Constitution  was  altogether 
the  work  of  a  few,  to  which  popular  movement  con 
tributed  nothing.  Of  popular  aspiration  for  unity 
there  was  none.  Statesmen  knew  that  the  new  nation 
or  group  of  nations  lay  helpless  between  pressing 
dangers  from  abroad  and  its  own  financial  difficulties. 
They  saw  clearly  that  they  must  create  a  Government 
of  the  Union  which  could  exercise  directly  upon  the 
individual  American  citizen  an  authority  like  that  of 
the  Government  of  his  own  State.  They  did  this,  but 
with  a  reluctant  and  half-convinced  public  opinion 
behind  them. 

The  makers  of  the  Constitution  earned  in  a  manner 
the  full  praise  that  has  ever  since  been  bestowed  on 
them.  But  they  did  not,  as  it  has  often  been  suggested 
they  did,  create  a  sort  of  archetype  and  pattern  for  all 
Governments  that  may  hereafter  partake  of  a  federal 
character.  Nor  has  the  curious  machine  which  they 
devised — with  its  balanced  opposition  between  two 
legislative  chambers,  between  the  whole  Legislature  and 
the  independent  executive  power  of  the  President, 
between  the  governing  power  of  the  moment  and  the 
permanent  expression  of  the  people's  will  embodied  in 
certain  almost  unalterable  laws — worked  conspicuously 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    23 

better  than  other  political  constitutions.     The  American 
Constitution  owes  its  peculiarities  partly  to  the  form 
which  the  State  Governments  had  naturally  taken,  and 
partly  to  sheer  misunderstanding  of  the  British  Con 
stitution,  but  much  more  to  the  want  at  the  time  of 
any  strong  sense  of  national  unity  and  to  the  existence  of 
a  good  deal  of  dislike  to  all  government  whatsoever. 
The  sufficient  merit  of  its  founders  was  that  of  patient ' 
and  skilful  diplomatists,  who,  undeterred  by  difficulties,  - 
found  out  the  most  satisfactory  settlement  that  had  a 
chance  of  being  accepted  by  the  States. 
r  So  the  Colonies,  which  in   1776  had  declared  their  \ 
independence  of  Great  Britain  under  the  name  of  the 
United   States   of  America,  entered   in    1789   into   the 
possession  of  machinery  of  government  under  which 
their  unity  and  independence  could  be  maintained. 

It  will  be  well  at  once  to  describe  those  features  of 
the  Constitution  which  it  will  be  necessary  for  us  later 
to  bear  in  mind.  It  is  generally  known  that  the  Presi 
dent  of  the  United  States  is  an  elected  officer — elected 
by  what  operates,  though  intended  to  act  otherwise, 
as  a  popular  vote.  During  the  four  years  of  his  office 
he  might  roughly  be  said  to  combine  the  functions  of  the 
King  in  this>_  country  and  those  of  a  Prime  Minister 
whose  Cabinet  is  in  due  subjection  to  him.  But  that 
description  needs  one  very  important  qualification. 
He  wields,  with  certain  slight  restrictions,  the  whole 
executive  power  of  government,  but  neither  he  nor  any 
of  his  ministers  can,  like  the  ministers  of  our  King,  sit 
or  speak  in  the  Legislature,  nor  can  he,  like  pur  King, 
dissolve  that  Legislature.  He  has  indeed  a  veto  on 
Acts  of  Congress,  which  can  only  be  overridden  by  a 
large  majority  in  both  Houses.  But  the  executive  and 
the  legislative  powers  in  America  were  purposely  so  con 
stituted  as  to  be  independent  of  each  other  to  a  degree  ' 
which  is  unknown  in  this  country. 

(It  is  perhaps  not  very  commonly  understood  that 
President  and  Congress  alike  are  as  strictly  fettered  in 
their  action  by  the  Constitution  as  a  limited  liability 
company  is  by  its  Memorandum  of  Association.  )This 


24  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

;  Constitution,  which  defines  both  the  form  of  govern 
ment  and  certain  liberties  of  the  subject,  is  not  unalter 
able,  but  it  can  be  altered  only  by  a  process  which 
requires  the  consent  both  of  a  great  majority  in  Congress 
(or  alternatively  of  the  whole  people  of  the  Union  in  a 
special  vote)  and  also  of  a  great  majority  of  the  distinct 
States  composing  the  Union.  Thus  we  shall  have  to 
notice  later  that  a  "  Constitutional  Amendment " 
abolishing  slavery  became  a  terror  of  the  future  to 
many  people  in  the  slave  States,  but  remained  all  the 
time  an  impossibility  in  the  view  of  most  people  in  the 
free  States. 

We  have,  above  all  things,  to  dismiss  from  our  minds 
any  idea  that  the  Legislature  of  a  State  is  subordinate 
to  the  Congress  of  the  United  States,  or  that  a  State 
1  Governor  is  an  officer  under^  the  President.  The 
(Constitution  of  the  Union  was  'the  product  of  a  half- 
I  developed  sense  of  nationality.  Under  it  the  State 
authority  (in  the  American  sense  of  "  State  ")  and  the 
Union  or  Federal  authority  go  on  side  by  side  working 
in  separate  spheres,  each  subject  to  Constitutional 
restrictions,  but  each  in  its  own  sphere  supreme.  Thus 
the  State  authority  is  powerless  to  make  peace  or 
war  or  to  impose  customs  duties,  for  those  are  Federal 
matters.  But  the  Union  authority  is  equally  powerless, 
wherever  a  State  authority  has  been  constituted,  to 
impose  an  income  tax,  or  to  punish  ordinary  crime,  to 
promote  education,  or  to  regulate  factories. v  f  In 
particular,  by  the  Constitution  as  it  stood  till  after 
the  Civil  War,  the  Union  authority  was  able  to  prohibit 
the  importation  of  slaves  from  abroad  after  the  end  of 
1807,  but  had  no  power  to  abolish  slavery  itself  in  any 
of  the  States.  \ 

Further,  Congress  had  to  be  constituted  in  such  a 
manner  as  to  be  agreeable  to  the  smaller  States  which 
did  not  wish  to  enter  into  a  Union  in  which  their 
influence  would  be  swamped  by  their  more  populous 
neighbours.  Their  interest  was  secured  by  providing 
that  in  the  Senate  each  State  should  have  two  members 
and  no  more,  while  in  the  House  of  Representatives  the 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION     25 

people  of  the  whole  Union  are  represented  according  to 
population.  Thus  legislation  through  Congress  requires 
the  concurrence  of  two  forces  which  may  easily  be 
opposed,  that  of  the  majority  of  American  citizens  and 
that  of  the  majority  of  the  several  States.  Of  the  two 
chambers,  the  Senate,  whose  members  are  elected  for 
six  years,  and  to  secure  continuity  do  not  all  retire 
at  the  same  time,  became  as  time  went  on,  though  not 
at  first,  attractive  to  statesmen  of  position,  and  acquired 
therefore  additional  influence. 

Lastly,  the  Union  was  and  is  still  the  possessor  of 
Territories  not  included  in  any  State,  and  in  the  Territories, 
whatever  subordinate  self-government  they  might  be 
allowed,  the  Federal  authority  has  always  been  supreme 
and  uncontrolled  in  all  matters.  But  as  these  Terri 
tories  have  become  more  settled  and  more  populated, 
portions  of  them  have  steadily  from  the  first  been 
organised  as  States  and  admitted  to  the  Union.  It  is 
for  Congress  to  settle  the  time  of  their  admission  and 
to  make  any  conditions  in  regard  to  their  Constitutions 
as  States.  But  when  once  admitted  as  States  they 
have  thenceforward  the  full  rights  of  the  original 
States.  Within  all  the  Territories^  while ;  they ^remainedX 
under  its  jurisdictionJiLlay  witk  Congress,  to  determine  \ 
whether  slavery  should  be  lawful  or  not.,  and?  wb^g. 
any  ^rtion^oL-lheiiLJHgas  ripe  for  ^dmissJQn_tg_  the 
Union  as  a  State,  Congress  could  insist  that  the  new 
State's  Constitution  should  or  should  not  prohibit 
slavery.^  When  the  Constitution  of  the  Union  was  being 
settled,  slavery  was  the  subject  of  most  careful  com 
promise  ;  but  in  any  union  formed  between  slave  States 
I  and  free,  a  bitter  root  of  controversy  must  have  remained, 
\  and  the  opening  through  which  controversy  actually  > 
\  returned  was^ provided  by  the  Territories.  ' 

~~On  all  other  matters  the  makers  of  the  Constitution 
had  in  the  highest  temper  of  statesmanship  found  a 
way  round  seemingly  insuperable  difficulties.  The 
whole  attitude  of  "  the  fathers  "  towards  slavery  is  a 
question  of  some  consequence  to  a  biographer  of  Lincoln, 
and  we  shall  return  to  it  in  a  little  while. 


26  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

2.  Territorial  Expansion. 

A  machine  of  government  had  been  created,  and  we 
are  shortly  to  consider  how  it  was  got  to  work.  But 
the  large  dominion  to  be  governed  had  to  be  settled,  and 
its  area  was  about  to  undergo  an  enormous  expansion. 
It  will  be  convenient  at  this  point  to  mark  the  stages  of 
this  development. 

The  thirteen  Colonies  had,  when  they  first  revolted, 
definite  western  boundaries,  the  westernmost  of  them 
reaching  back  from  the  sea-board  to  a  frontier  in  the 
Aheghany  Miuntains.  But  at  the  dose  of  the  war 
Great  Britain  ceded  to  the  United  States  the  whole  of 
the  inland  country  up  to  the  Mississippi  River.  Virginia 
had  in  the  meantime  effectively  colonised  Kentucky  to 
the  west  of  her,  and  for  a  time  this  was  treated  as  within 
her  borders.  In  a  similar  way  Tennessee  had  been 
settled  from  North  and  South  Carolina  and  was  treated 
as  part  of  the  former.  Virginia  had  also  established 
claims  by  conquest  north  of  the  Ohio  River  in  what 
was  called  the  North-West  Territory,  but  these  claims 
and  all  similar  claims  of  particular  States  in  unsettled 
or  half-settled  territory  were  shortly  before  or  shortly 
after  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution  ceded  to  the 
Union  Government.  But  the  dominions  of  that  Govern 
ment  soon  received  a  vast  accession.  In  1803,  by  a 
brave  exercise  of  the  Constitutional  powers  which  he 
was  otherwise  disposed  to  restrict  jealously,  President 
Jefferson  bought  from  Napoleon  I.  the  great  expanse 
of  country  west  of  the  Mississippi  called  Louisiana. 
This  region  in  the  extreme  south  was  no  wider  than  the 
preset:  State  ;:  Liuisiana.  but  further  north  it  v.-iiened 
out  so  as  to  take  in  the  whole  watershed  of  the  Missouri 
and  its  tributaries,  including  in  the  extreme  north 
nearly  all  the  present  State  of  Montana.  In  1819 
Florida  was  purchased  from  Spain,  and  that  country 
at  the  same  time  abandoned  its  claims  to  a  strip  of 
coastland  which  now  forms  the  sea-board  of  Alabama 
and  Mississippi. 

^uch  was  the  extent  of  the  United  States  when  Lincoln 


GROWTH   OF  THE   AMERICAN   NATION    27 

began  his  political  life.  In  the  movement  of  population 
by  which  this  domain  was  being  settled  up,  different 
streams  may  be  roughly  distinguished.  First,  there 
was  from  1780  onwards  a  constant  movement  of  the 
poorer  class  and  of  younger  sons  of  rich  men  from  the 
great  State  of  Virginia  and  to  some  extent  from  the 
Carolinas  into  Kentucky  and  Tennessee,  whence  they 
often  shifted  further  north  into  Indiana  and  Illinois, 
or  sometimes  further  west  into  Missouri.  It  was  mainly 
a  movement  of  single  families  or  groups  of  families  of 
adventurous  pioneers,  very  sturdy,  and  very  turbulent. 
Then  there  came  the  expansion  of  the  great  plantation 
interest  in  the  further  South,  carrying  with  it  as  it 
spread,  not  occasional  slaves  as  in  Kentucky  and 
Tennessee,  but  the  whole  plantation  system.  This 
movement  went  not  only  directly  westward,  but  still 
more  by  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  and  up  the  Mississippi,  into 
the  State  of  Louisiana,  where  a  considerable  French 
population  had  settled,  the  State  of  Mississippi,  and 
later  into  Missouri.  Later  still  came  the  westward 
movement  from  the  Northern  States.  The  energies 
of  the  people  in  these  States  had  at  first  been  to  a  great 
extent  absorbed  by  sea-going  pursuits  and  the  sub 
jugation  of  their  own  rugged  soil,  so  that  they  reached 
western  regions  like  Illinois  rather  later  than  did  the 
settlers  from  States  further  south.  Ultimately,  as  their 
manufactures  grew,  immigration  from  Europe  began 
its  steady  flow  to  these  States,  and  the  great  westward 
stream,  which  continuing  in  our  days  has  filled  up  the 
rich  lands  of  the  far  North-West,  grew  in  volume.  But 
want  of  natural  timber  and  other  causes  hindered  the 
development  of  the  fertile  prairie  soil  in  the  regions 
beyond  the  upper  Mississippi,  till  the  period  of  railway 
development,  which  began  about  1840,  was  far  advanced. 
Illinois  was  Far  West  in  1830,  Iowa  and  Minnesota  con 
tinued  to  be  so  in  1860.  The  Northerners,  when  they 
began  to  move  westward,  came  in  comparatively  large 
numbers,  bringing  comparatively  ordered  habits  and 
the  full  machinery  of  outward  civilisation  with  them. 
Thus  a  great  social  change  followed  upon  their  arrival 


28  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN  4^ 

in  the  regions  to  which,  only  scattered  pioneers  such  as 
the  Lincolns  had  previously  penetrated.  ^ln  Illinois, 
with  which  so  much  of  our  story  is  bound  up,  the  rapidity 
of  that  change  may  be  estimated  from  the  fact  that 
the  population  of  that  State  multiplied  sevenfold  between 
the  time  when  Lincoln  settled  there  and  the  day  when 
he  left  it  as  President,  j 

The  concluding  stages  by  which  the  dominions  of 
the  United  States  came  to  be  as  we  know  them  were  : 
the  annexation  by  agreement  in  1846  of  the  Republic 
of  Texas,  which  had  separated  itself  from  Mexico  and 
which  claimed  besides  the  great  State  of  Texas  a  con 
siderable  territory  reaching  north-west  to  the  upper 
portions  of  the  Arkansas  River ;  the  apportionment  to 
the  Union  by  a  delimitation  treaty  with  Great  Britain 
in  1846  of  the  Oregon  Territory,  including  roughly  the 
State  of  that  name  and  the  rest  of  the  basin  of  the 
Columbia  River  up  to  the  present  frontier — British 
Columbia  being  at  the  same  time  apportioned  to  Great 
Britain  ;  the  conquest  from  Mexico  in  1 848  of  California 
and  a  vast  mountainous  tract  at  the  back  of  it ;  the 
purchase  from  Mexico  of  a  small  frontier  strip  in  1853  ; 
and  the  acquisition  at  several  later  times  of  various 
outlying  dependencies  which  will  in  no  way  concern  us. 

3.  The  Growth  of  the  Practice  and  Traditions  of  the 
Union  Government. 

We  must  turn  back  to  the  internal  growth  of  the  new 
united  nation.  When  the  Constitution  had  been  formed 
and  the  question  of  its  acceptance  by  the  States  had 
been  at  last  settled,  and  when  Washington  had  been 
inaugurated  as  the  first  President  under  it,  a  wholly 
new  conflict  arose  between  two  parties,  led  by  two 
Ministers  in  the  President's  Cabinet,  Alexander  Hamilton 
and  Thomas  Jefferson.  Both  were  potent  and  remark 
able  men,  Hamilton  in  all  senses  a  great  man.  These 
two  men,  for  all  their  antagonism,  did  services  to  their 
country,  without  which  the  vigorous  growth  of  the  new 
nation  would  not  have  been  possible. 

The  figure  of  Alexander  Hamilton,  then  Secretary  of 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN   NATION    29 

V 

the  Treasury  (ranked  by  Talleyrand  with  Fox  and 
Napoleon  as  one  of  the  three  great  men  he  had  known), 
must  fascinate  any  English  student  of  the  period.  If  his 
name  is  not  celebrated  in  the  same  way  in  the  country 
which  he  so  eminently  served,  it  is  perhaps  because  in 
his  ideas,  as  in  his  origin,  he  was  not  strictly  American. 
As  a  boy,  half  Scotch,  half  French  Huguenot,  from  the 
English  West  Indian  island  of  Nevis,  he  had  been  at 
school  in  New  York  when  his  speeches  had  some  real 
effect  in  attaching  that  city  to  the  cause  of  Independ 
ence.  He  had  served  brilliantly  in  the  war,  on 
Washington's  staff  and  with  his  regiment.  He  had 
chivalrously  defended,  as  an  advocate  and  in  other  ways, 
the  Englishmen  and  loyalists  against  whose  cause  he 
fought.  He  had  induced  the  great  central  State  of 
New  York  to  accept  the  Constitution,  when  the  strongest 
local  party  would  have  rejected  it  and  made  the  Union 
impossible.  As  Washington's  Secretary  of  the  Treasury 
he  organised  the  machinery  of  government,  helped  his 
chief  to  preserve  a  strong,  upright  and  cautious  foreign 
policy  at  the  critical  point  of  the  young  Republic's 
infancy,  and  performed  perhaps  the  greatest  and  most 
difficult  service  of  all  in  setting  the  disordered  finances 
of  the  country  upon  a  sound  footing.  In  early  middle 
age  he  ended  a  life,  not  flawless  but  admirable  and 
lovable,  in  a  duel,  murderously  forced  upon  him  by 
one  Aaron  Burr.  This  man  who  was  an  elegant 
profligate,  with  many  graces  but  no  public  principle, 
was  a  claimant  to  the  Presidency  in  opposition  to 
Hamilton's  greatest  opponent,  Jefferson ;  Hamilton 
knowingly  incurred  a  feud  which  must  at  the  best  have 
been  dangerous  to  him,  by  unhesitatingly  throwing  his 
weight  upon  the  side  of  Jefferson,  his  own  ungenerous 
rival.  The  details  of  his  policy  do  not  concern  us,  but 
the  United  States  could  hardly  have  endured  for  many 
years  without  the  passionate  sense  of  the  need  of 
government  and  the  genius  for  actual  administration 
with  which  Hamilton  set  the  new  nation  on  its  way. 
Nevertheless — so  do  gifts  differ — the  general  spirit 
which  has  on  the  whole  informed  the  American  nation 


3o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

and  held  it  together  was  neither  respected  nor  under 
stood  by  him.  His  party,  called  the  Federalists,  because 
they  claimed  to  stand  for  a  strong  and  an  efficient 
Federal  Government,  did  not  survive  him  long.  It  is 
of  interest  to  us  here  only  because,  with  its  early 
disappearance,  there  ceased  for  ever  to  be  in  America 
any  party  whatsoever  which  in  any  sense  represented 
aristocratic  principles  or  leanings. 

The  fate  of  Jefferson's  party  (at  first  called  Republican 
but  by  no  means  to  be  confused  with  the  Republican 
party  which  will  concern  us  later)  was  far  different, 
for  the  Democratic  party,  represented  by  the  President 
of  the  United  States  at  this  moment,  claims  to  descend 
from  it  in  unbroken  apostolic  succession.  But  we  need 
not  pause  to  trace  the  connecting  thread  between  them, 
real  as  it  is,  for  parties  are  not  to  be  regarded  as  in 
dividuals.  Indeed  the  personality  of  Thomas^  Jefferson, 
Secretary  of  State  in  Washington's  Cabinet,  impressed 
itself,  during  his  life  and  long  after,  upon  all  America 
more  than  that  of  any  other  man.  Democrats  to-day 
have  described  Lincoln,  who  by  no  means  belonged  to 
their  party,  as  Jefferson's  spiritual  heir  ;  and  Lincoln 
would  have  welcomed  the  description. 

No  biographer  has  achieved  an  understanding  present 
ment  of  Jefferson's  curious  character,  which  as  presented 
by  unfriendly  critics  is  an  unpleasing  combination  of 
contrasting  elements.  A  tall  and  burly  fellow,  a  good 
horseman  and  a  good  shot,  living  through  seven  years 
of  civil  war,  which  he  had  himself  heralded  in,  without 
the  inclination  to  strike  a  blow ;  a  scholar,  musician, 
and  mathematician,  without  delicacy,  elevation,  or 
precision  of  thought  or  language  ;  a  man  of  intense 
ambition,  without  either  administrative  capacity  or 
the  courage  to  assert  himself  in  counsel  or  in  debate  ; 
a  dealer  in  philanthropic  sentiment,  privately  malignant 
and  vindictiyer"*nThis  is  not  as  a  whole  a  credible 
portrait ;  it  cannot  stand  for  the  man  as  his  friends 
knew  him  ;  but  there  is  evidence  for  each  feature  of  it, 
and  it  remains  impossible  for  a  foreigner  to  think  of 
Jefferson  and  not  compare  him  to  his  disadvantage  with 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    31 

the  antagonist  whom  he  eclipsed.  By  pertinacious 
industry,  however,  working  chiefly  through  private 
correspondence,  he  constructed  a  great  party,  dominated 
a  nation,  and  dominated  it  mainly  for  good.  For  the 
rapid  and  complete  triumph  of  Jefferson's  party  over 
its  opponents  signifies  a  very  definite  and  lasting  con 
version  of  the  main  stream  of  American  public  opinion 
to  what  may  be  called  the  sane  element  in  the  principles 
of  the  French  Revolution.  At  the  time  when  he  set 
himself  to  counterwork  Hamilton,  American  statesman 
ship  was  likely  to  be  directed  only  to  making  Government 
strong  and  to  ensuring  the  stability  of  the  business 
world  ;  for  reaction  against  the  bloody  absurdities  that 
had  happened  in  France  was  strong  in  America,  and 
in  English  thought,  which  still  had  influence  in  America, 
it  was  all-powerful.  Against  this  he  asserted  an  intense^ 
belief  in  the  value  of  freedom,  in  the  equal  claim  of  men  j 
of  all  conditions  to  the  consideration  of  government, 
and  in  the  supreme  importance  to  government  of  the 
consenting  mind  of  the  governed.  And  he  made  this 
sense  so  definitely  a  part  of  the  national  stock  of  ideas 
that,  while  the  older-established  principles  of  strong  and 
sound  government  were  not  lost  to  sight,  they  were 
consciously  rated  as  subordinate  to  the  principles  of 
liberty. 

It  must  not  be  supposed  that  the  ascendency  thus 
early  acquired  by  what  may  be  called  liberal  opinions 
in  America  was  a  matter  merely  of  setting  some  fine 
phrases  in  circulation,  or  of  adopting,  as  was  early  done 
in  most  States,  a  wide  franchise  and  other  external 
marks  of  democracy.  We  may  dwell  a  little  longer  on 
the  unusual  but  curiously  popular  figure  of  Jefferson, 
for  it  illustrates  the  spirit  with  which  the  commonwealth 
became  imbued  under  his  leadership.  He  has  sometimes 
been  presented  as  a  man  of  flabby  character  whose 
historical  part  was  that  of  intermediary  between  im 
practicable  French  "  philosophes  "  and  the  ruffians  and 
swindlers  that  Martin  Chuzzlewit  encountered,  who 
were  all  "  children  of  liberty,"  -and  whose  "  boastful 
answer  to  the  Despot  and  the  Tyrant  was  that  their 


32  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

bright  home  was  in  the  Settin'  Sun."  He  was  nothing 
of  the  kind.  His  judgment  was  probably  unsound  on 
the  questions  of  foreign  policy  on  which  as  Secretary 
of  State  he  differed  from  Washington,  and  he  leaned,  no 
doubt,  to  a  jealous  and  too  narrow  insistence  upon  the 
limits  set  by  the  Constitution  to  the  Government's 
power.  But  he  and  his  party  were  emphatically  right 
in  the  resistance  which  they  offered  to  certain  needless 
measures  of  coercion.  As  President,  though  he  was 
not  a  great  President,  he  suffered  the  sensible  course  of 
administration  originated  by  his  opponent  to  continue 
undisturbed,  and  America  owed  to  one  bold  and  far- 
seeing  act  of  his  the  greatest  of  the  steps  by  which  her 
territory  was  enlarged.  It  is,  however,  in  the  field  of 
domestic  policy,  which  rested  with  the  States  and  with 
which  a  President  has  often  little  to  do,  that  the  results 
of  his  principles  must  be  sought.  Jefferson  was  a  man 
who  had  worked  unwearyingly  in  Virginia  at  sound, 
/and  what  we  should  now  call  conservative,  reforms, 
/  establishing  religious  toleration,  reforming  a  preposterous 
/  land  law,  seeking  to  provide  education  for  the  poor, 
|  striving  unsuccessfully  for  a  sensible  scheme  of  gradual 
,.  emancipation  of  the  slaves.  In  like  manner  his  disciples 
'  after  him,  in  their  several  States,  devoted  themselves  to 
the  kind  of  work  in  removing  manifest  abuses  and 
providing  for  manifest  new  social  needs  in  which 
English  reformers  like  Romilly  and  Bentham,  and  the 
leaders  of  the  first  reformed  Parliament,  were  to  be 
successful  somewhat  later.  The  Americans  who  so 
exasperated  Dickens  vainly  supposed  themselves  to  be 
far  ahead  of  England  in  much  that  we  now  consider 
essential  to  a  well-ordered  nat'on.  But  there  could  have 
been  no  answer  to  Americans  of  Jefferson's  generation 
if  they  had  made  the  same  claim. 

It  is  with  this  fact  in  mind  that  we  should  approach 
the  famous  words  of  Jefferson  which  echoed  so  long  with 
triumphant  or  reproachful  sound  in  the  ears  of  Americans 
and  to  which  long  after  Linco^  was  to  make  a  memor 
able  appeal.  The  propaganda  which  he  carried  on 
when  the  Constitution  had  been  adopted  was  on  behalf 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    33 

of  a  principle  which,  he  had  enunciated  as  a  younger 
man  when  he  drafted  the  Declaration  of  Independence. 
That  document  is  mainly  a  rehearsal  of  the  colonists' 
grievances,  and  is  as  strictly  lawyerlike  and  about  as 
fair  or  unfair  as  the  arguments  of  a  Parliamentarian 
under  Charles  I.  But  the  argumentation  is  prefaced 
with  these  sounding  words  :  "  We  hold  these  truths  to 
be  self-evident  : — that  all  men  are  created  equal ;  that 
they  are  endowed  by  their  Creator  with  certain  un- 
alienable  rights  ;  that  among  these  are  life,  liberty 
and  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  That  to  secure  these 
rights,  governments  are  instituted  among  men,  deriving 
their  just  powers  from  the  consent  of  the  governed." 
Few  propositions  outside  the  Bible  have  offered  so 
easy  a  mark  to  the  shafts  of  unintelligently  clever 
criticism. 

Jefferson,  when  he  said  that  "  all  men  are  created 
equal,"  and  the  Tory  Dr.  Johnson,  when  he  spoke  of 
"  the  natural  equality  of  man,"  used  a  curious  eighteenth 
century  phrase,  of  which  a  Greek  scholar  can  see  the 
origin  ;  but  it  did  not  mean  anything  absurd,  nor,  on  the 
other  hand,  did  it  convey  a  mere  platitude.  It  should 
not  be  necessary  to  explain,  as  Lincoln  did  long  after, 
that  Jefferson  did  not  suppose  all  men  to  be  of  equal 
height  or  weightier  equally  wise  or  equally  good.  He 
did,  however,  contend  for  a  principle  of  which  one 
elementary  application  is  the  law  which  makes  murder 
the  same  crime  whatever  be  the  relative  positions  of 
the  murderer  and  the  murdered  man.  Such  a  law  was 
indeed  firmly  rooted  in  England  before  Jefferson  talked 
of  equality,  but  it  amazed  the  rest  of  Europe  when 
the  House  of  Lords  hanged  a  peer  for  the  murder  of 
his  servant.  There  are  indefinitely  many  further  ways 
in  which  men  who  are  utterly  unequal  had  best  be 
treated  as  creatures  equally  entitled  to  the  considera 
tion  of  government  and  of  their  neighbours.  It  is 
safer  to  carry  this  principle  too  far  than  not  to  carry 
it  far  enough.  If  Jefferson  had  expressed  this  and  his 
cognate  principle  of  liberty  with  scientific  precision, 
or  with  the  full  personal  sincerity  with  which  a  greater 


34  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

man  like  Lincoln  expressed  it,  he  would  have  said  little 
from  which  any  Englishman  to-day  would  dissent. 
None  the  less  he  would  have  enunciated  a  doctrine 
which  most  Governments  then  existing  set  at  naught 
or  proscribed,  and  for  which  Hamilton  and  the  pros 
perous  champions  of  independence  who  supported  him 
had  no  use. 

The  Declaration  of  Independence  was  not  a  very 
candid  State  paper,  and  the  popularity  Jefferson  after 
wards  created  for  its  sentiments  was  not  wholly  free 
'  from  humbug.  Many  men  were  more  ready  to  think 
themselves  the  equals  of  Washington  or  Hamilton  in 
the  respects  in  which  they  were  not  so,  than  to  think  a 
negro  their  own  equal  in  the  respects  in  which  he  was. 
The  boundless  space  and  untrammelled  conditions  of 
the  new  world  made  liberty  and  equality  in  some 
directions  highly  attainable  ideals,  so  much  so  that  they 
seemed  to  demand  little  effort  or  discipline.  The 
patriotic  orators  under  whom  Lincoln  sat  in  his  youth 
would  ascribe  to  the  political  wisdom  of  their  great 
democracy  what  was  really  the  result  of  geography. 
They  would  regard  the  extent  of  forest  and  prairie  as 
creditable  to  themselves,  just  as  some  few  Englishmen 
have  regarded  our  location  upon  an  island. 
s  This  does  not,  however,  do  away  with  the  value  of 
r  that  tradition  of  the  new  world  which  in  its  purest  and 
^  sincerest  form  became  part  and  parcel  of  Lincoln's  mind, 
Jefferson  was  a  great  American  patriot.  In  his  case 
insistence  on  the  rights  of  the  several  States  sprang 
from  no  half-hearted  desire  for  a  great  American  nation  ; 
he  regarded  these  provincial  organisations  as  machinery 
by  which  government  and  the  people  could  be  brought 
nearer  together  ;  and  he  contributed  that  which  was 
most  needed  for  the  evolution  of  a  vigorous  national 
life.  He  imparted  to  the  very  recent  historical  origin 
of  his  country,  and  his  followers  imparted  to  its  material 
conditions,  a  certain  element  of  poetry  and  the  felt 
presence  of  a  wholesome  national  ideal.  The  patriotism 
of  an  older  country  derives  its  glory  and  its  pride  from 
nfluences  deep  rooted  in  the  past,  creating  a  tradition 


GROWTH  OF  THE   AMERICAN  NATION    35 

of  public  and  private  action  which  needs  no  definite 
formula.  The  man  who  did  more  than  any  other  to 
supply  this  lack  in  a  new  country,  by  imbuing  its 
national  consciousness — even  its  national  cant— with 
high  aspiration,  did — it  may  well  be — more~~trian  any 
strong  administrator  or  constructive  statesman  to 
create  a  Union  which  should  thereafter  seem  worth 
preserving. 

4.  The  Missouri  Compromise. 

No  sober  critic,  applying  to  the  American  statesmen 
of  the  first  generation  the  standards  which  he  would 
apply  to  their  English  contemporaries,  can  blame  them 
in  the  least  because  they  framed  their  Constitution  as 
best  they  could  and  were  not  deterred  by  the  scruples 
which  they  felt  about  slavery  from  effecting  a  Union 
between  States  which,  on  all  other  grounds  except 
their  latent  difference  upon  slavery,  seemed  meant  to 
be  one.  But  many  of  these  men  had  set  their  hands  -j- 
in  the  Declaration  of  Independence  to  the  most  un 
qualified  claim  of  liberty  and  equality  for  all  men 
and  proceeded,  in  the  Constitution,  to  give  nineteen 
years'  grace  to  "  that  most  detestable  sum  of  all 
villainies,"  as  Wesley  called  it,  the  African  slave  trade, 
and  to  impose  on  the  States  which  thought  slavery  wrong 
the  dirty  work  of  restoring  escaped  slaves  to  captivity. 
"  Why,"  Dr.  Johnson  had  asked,  "  do  the  loudest  yelps 
for  liberty  come  from  the  drivers  of  slaves  ?  "  We  are 
forced  to  recognise,  upon  any  study  of  the  facts,  that 
they  could  not  really  have  made  the  Union  otherwise 
than  as  they  did  ;  yet  a  doubt  presents  itself  as  to  the 
general  soundness  and  sincerity  of  their  boasted  notions 
of  liberty.  Now,  later  on  we  shall  havejtojanderstand 
the  pn1iry_as  to  slavery  jcmJ^lmli_JlLj^i^h-XiHieelar^ 
stepped  forward  as  a_  leadejr.  In  his  own  constantly 
reiterated  words  it  was  a  return  to  the  position  of  "  the 
fathers,"  and,  though  he  was  not  a  professional  his 
torian,  it  concerns  us  to  know  that  there  was  sincerity 
at  least  in  his  .intensely  historical  view  of  politics. 
We  have,  then,  to  see  first  how  "  the  fathers  " — that  is,  I 


Kj  ABRAHAM   LINCOLN 


the    most    considerable    men    among   those    who   won 

Independence  and  made  the  Constitution — set  out  with  a 

/  very  honest  view  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  but  with  a 

/   too  comfortable  hope  of  its  approaching  end,  which  one  or 

!  two  lived  to  see  frustrated  ;  secondly,  how  the  men  who 
succeeded  them  were  led  to  abandon  such  hopes  and 

\    content  themselves  with  a  compromise  as  to  slavery 
which  they  trusted  would  at  least  keep  the  American 
\nation  in  being. 

Among  those  who  signed  the  Declaration  of  Inde 
pendence  there  were  presumably  some  of  Dr.  Johnson's 

*  "  yelpers."  It  mattered  more  that  there  were  sturdy 
people  who  had  no  idea  of  giving  up  slavery  and  probably^ 
did  not  relish  having  to  join  in  protestations  about 
equality.  Men  like  Jefferson  ought  to  have  known 
well  that  their  associates  in  South  Carolina  and  Georgia 
in  particular  did  not  share  their  aspirations — the  people 
of  Georgia  indeed  were  recent  and  ardent  converts  to  the 
slave  system.  But  these  sincere  and  insincere  believers 
in  slavery  were  the  exceptions  ;  their  views  did  not  then 
seem  to  prevail  even  in  the  greatest  of  the  slave  States, 
Virginia.  /Broadly  speaking,  the  American  opinion  on 
this  master  in  1775  or  in  1789  had  gone  as  far  ahead  of 
English'  opinion,  as  English  opinion  had  in  turn  gone 
ahead  of  American,  when,  in  1833,  the  year  after  the 
first  Reform  Bill,  the  English  people  put  its  hand  into 
its  pocket  and  bought  out  its  own  slave  owners  in  the 
West  Indies.  The  British  Government  had  forced 
several  of  the  American  Colonies  to  permit  slavery 
against  their  will,  and  only  in  1769  it  had  vetoed,  in  the 
interest  of  British  trade,  a  Colonial  enactment  for 
suppressing  the  slave  trade.  This  was  sincerely  felt  as 
a  part,  though  a  minor  part,  of  the  grievance  against 
the  mother  country.  So  far  did  such  views  prevail 
on  the  surface  that  a  Convention  of  all  the  Colonies  in 
1774  unanimously  voted  that  "  the  abolition  of  domestic 
slavery  is  the  greatest  object  of  desire  in  those  Colonies 
where  it  was  unhappily  introduced  in  their  infant  state. 
But  previous  to  the  enfranchisement  of  the  slaves  in 
law,  it  is  necessary  to  exclude  all  further  importation 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    37 

from  Africa."  It  was  therefore  very  commonly  assumed 
when,  after  an  interval  of  war  which  suspended  such 
reforms,  Independence  was  achieved,  that  slavery  was 
a  doomed  institution.  \ 

///Those  among  the  "  fathers  "  whose  names  are  best  \ 
own  in  England,  Washington,  John  Adams,  Jefferson,       j 
adison,  Franklin,  and  Hamilton,  were  all  opponents     J 

slavery.  These  include  the  first  four  Presidents, 
and  the  leaders  of  very  different  schools  of  thought. 
Some  of  them,  Washington  and  Jefferson  at  least,  had 
a  few  slaves  of  their  own.  Washington's  attitude  to  his 
slaves  is  illustrated  by  a  letter  which  he  wrote  to  secure 
the  return  of  a  black  attendant  of  Mrs.  Washington's 
who  had  run  away  (a  thing  which  he  had  boasted  could 
never  occur  in  his  household)  ;  the  runaway  was  to  be 
brought  back  if  she  could  be  persuaded  to  return  ;  her 
master's  legal  power  to  compel  her  was  not  to  be  used. 
She  was  in  fact  free,  but  had  foolishly  left  a  good  place ; 
and  there  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  it  was  other-^ 
wise  with  Jefferson's  slaves.  Jefferson's  theory  was 
vehemently  against  slavery.  In  old  age  he  gave  up 
hope  in  the  matter  and  was  more  solicitous  for  union 
than  for  liberty,  but  this  was  afterj:he  disappointment -1- 
of  many  efforts.  In  these  efforts  he  had  no  illusory 
notion  of  equality  ;  he  wrote  in  1791,  when  he  had  been 
defeated  in  the  attempt  to  carry  a  measure  of  gradual 
emancipation  in  Virginia  :  "  Nobody  wishes  more  than 
I  do  to  see  such  proofs  as  you  exhibit,  that  Nature  has 
given  to  our  black  brothers  talents  equal  to  those  of 
the  other  colours  of  men,  and  that  the  appearance  of  a 
want  of  them  is  owing  mainly  to  the  degraded  condition 
of  their  existence,  both  in  Africa  and  America.  I  can 
add  with  truth,  that  nobody  wishes  more  ardently  to 
see  a  good  system  commenced  for  raising  the  condition 
both  of  their  body  and  mind  to  what  it  ought  to  be,  as 
fast  as  the  imbecility  of  their  present  existence  and  other 
circumstances,  which  cannot  be  neglected,  will  permit." 
When  he  felt  at  last  that  freedom  was  not  making 
way,  his  letters,  by  which  his  influence  was  chiefly 
exercised,  abounded  in  passionate  regrets.  "  I  tremble 


38  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

for  my  country,"  he  wrote,  "  when  I  think  of  the 
negro  and  remember  that  God  is  just."  But  if  he  is 
judged  not  by  his  sentiments,  or  even  by  his  efforts,  but 
by  what  he  accomplished,  this  rhetorical  champion  of 
freedom  did  accomplish  one  great  act,  the  first  link  as  it 
proved  in  the  chain  of  events  by  which  slavery  was 
ultimately  abolished.  In  1 784  the  North- West  Territory, 
as  it  was  called,  was  ceded  by  Virginia  to  the  old 
Congress  of  the  days  before  the  Union.  Jefferson  then 
endeavoured  to  pass  an  Ordinance  by  which  slavery 
should  be  excluded  from  all  territory  that  might  ever 
belong  to  Congress.  In  this  indeed  he  failed,  for  in  part 
of  the  territory  likely  to  be  acquired  slavery  was  already 
established,  but  the  result  was  a  famous  Ordinance 
of  1787,  by  which  slavery  was  for  ever  excluded  from 
the  soil  of  the  North-West  Territory  itself,  and  thus, 
when  they  came  into  being,  the  States  of  Ohio,  Indiana, 
Illinois,  Michigan,  and  Wisconsin  found  themselves 
congenitally  incapable  of  becoming  slave  States. 

The  further  achievements  of  that  generation  in  this 
matter  were  considerable.  It  must  of  course  be  under 
stood  that  the  holding  of  slaves  and  the  slave  trade 
from  Africa  were  regarded  as  two  distinct  questions. 
The  new  Congress  abolished  the  slave  trade  on  the  first 
day  on  which  the  Constitution  allowed  it  to  do  so,  that 
is,  on  January  I,  1808.  The  mother  country  abolished 
it  just  about  the  same  time.  But  already  all  but 
three  of  the  States  had  for  themselves  abolished  the 
slave  trade  in  their  own  borders.  As  to  slavery  itself, 
seven  of  the  original  thirteen  States  and  Vermont, 
the  first  of  the  added  States,  had  abolished  that  before 
1 805 .  These  indeed  were  Northern  States,  where  slavery 
was  not  of  importance,  but  in  Virginia  there  was,  or 
had  been  till  lately,  a  growing  opinion  that  slavery  was 
not  economical,  and,  with  the  ignorance  common  in 
one  part  of  a  country  of  the  true  conditions  in  another 
part,  it  was  natural  to  look  upon  emancipation  as  a 
policy  which  would  spread  of  itself.  At  any  rate  it  is 
certain  fact  that  the  chief  among  the  men  who  had 
made  the  Constitution,  had  at  that  time  so  regarded  it, 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    39 

and  continued  to  do  so.  Under  this  belief  and  in  the 
presence  of  many  pressing  subjects  of  interest  the  early 
movement  for  emancipation  in  America  died  down  with 
its  work  half  finished. 

But  before  this  happy  belief  expired  an  economic 
event  had  happened  which  riveted  slavery  upon  the 
South.  In  1793  Eli  Whitney,  a  Harvard  student  upon 
a  holiday  in  the  South,  invented  the  first  machine  for 
cleaning  cotton  of  its  seeds.  The  export  of  cotton 
jumped  from  192,000  Ibs.  in  1791  to  6,000,000  Ibs.  in 
1795.  Slave  labour  had  been  found,  or  was  believed, 
to  be  especially  economical  in  cotton  growing.  Slavery 
therefore  rapidly  became  the  mainstay  of  wealth  and 
of  the  social  system  in  South  Carolina  and  throughout 
the  far  South  ;  and  in  a  little  while  the  baser  sort  of  plan 
ters  in  Virginia  discovered  that  breeding  slaves  to  sell 
down  South  was  a  very  profitable  form  of  stock-raising. 

We  may  pass  to  the  year  1820,  when  an  enactment 
was  passed  by  Congress  which  for  thirty-four  years 
thereafter  might  be  regarded  as  hardly  less  fundamental 
than  the  Constitution  itself.  Up  till  then  nine  new 
States  had  been  added  to  the  original  thirteen.  It  was 
repugnant  to  principles  still  strong  in  the  North  that 
these  States  should  be  admitted  to  the  Union  with 
State  Constitutions  which  permitted  slavery.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  was  for  two  reasons  important  to  the 
chief  slave  States  that  they  should  be.  They  would 
otherwise  be  closed  to  Southern  planters  who  wished  to 
migrate  to  unexhausted  soil  carrying  with  them  the 
methods  of  industry  and  the  ways  of  life  which  they 
understood.  Furthermore,  the  North  was  bound  to 
have  before  long  a  great  preponderance  of  population, 
and  if  this  were  not  neutralised  by  keeping  the  number 
of  States  on  one  side  and  the  other  equal  there  would  be 
a  future  political  danger  to  slavery.  Up  to  a  certain 
point  the  North  could  with  good  conscience  yield  to  the 
South  in  this  matter,  for  the  soil  of  four  of  the  new  slave 
States  had  been  ceded  to  the  Union  by  old  slave  States 
and  slave-holders  had  settled  freely  upon  it  ;  and  in  a 
fifth,  Louisiana,  slavery  had  been  safeguarded  by  the 


40  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

express  stipulations  of  the  treaty  with  France,  which 
applied  to  that  portion,  though  no  other,  of  the  territory 
then  ceded.  Naturally,  then,  it  had  happened,  though 
without  any  definite  agreement,  that  for  years  past 
slave  States  and  free  States  had  been  admitted  to  the 

I  Union  in  pairs.  Now  arose  the  question  of  a  further 
portion  of  the  old  French  territory,  the  present  State  of 
Missouri.  A  few  slave-holders  with  their  slaves  had 
in  fact  settled  there,  but  no  distinct  claims  on  behalf  of 
slavery  could  be  alleged.  The  Northern  Senators  and 
members  of  Congress  demanded  therefore  that  the  Con 
stitution  of  Missouri  should  provide  for  the  gradual 
extinction  of  slavery  there.  Naturally  there  arose  a 
controversy  which  sounded  to  the  aged  Jefferson  like 
"  a  fire-bell  in  the  night  "  and  revealed  for  the  first  time 
to  all  America  a  deep  rift  in  the  Union.  The  Repre 
sentatives  of  the  South  eventually  carried  their  main 
point  with  the  votes  of  several  Northern  men,  known 

'  to  history  as  the  "  Dough-faces,"  who  all  lost  their 
seats  at  the  next  election.  Missouri  was  admitted  as  a 
slave  State,  Maine  about  the  same  time  as  a  free  State  ; 
and  it  was  enacted  that  thereafter  in  the  remainder  of 
the  territory  that  had  been  bought  from  France  slavery 
should  be  unlawful  north  of  latitude  36°  30',  and  lawful 
south  of  it. 

This  was  the  Missouri  Compromise.  The  North 
regarded  it  at  first  as  a  humiliation,  but  learnt  to 
point  to  it  later  as  a  sort  of  Magna  Carta  for  the 
Northern  territories.  The  adoption  of  it  marks  a  point 
from  which  it  became  for  thirty-four  years  the  express 
ambition  of  the  principal  American  statesmen  and  the 
tacit  object  of  every  party  manager  to  keep  the  slavery 
question  from  ever  becoming  again  a  burning  issue  in 
politics.  The  collapse  of  it  in  1854  was  to  prove  the 
decisive  event  in  the  career  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  aged 
1 1  when  it  was  passed. 

5.  Leaders.,  Parties,  and  Tendencies  in  Lincoln's  Youth. 

Just  about  the  year  1830,  when  Lincoln  started  life 
in  Illinois,  several  distinct  movements  in  national  life 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    41 

began    or    culminated.     They    link    themselves    with 
several  famous  names. 

^The  two  leaders  to  ^vvhom,  as  a  young  politician, 
Lincoln  owedTsome  sort  of  allegiance  were  Webster  and 
^ay^andrtSeyjcuntinued  throughout  his  long  political 
apprenticeship  to  Be  recognised  in  most  of  America  as 
the  great  men  of  their  time.  Daniel  Webster  must 
have  been  nearly  a  great  man.  He  was  always  passed 
over  for  the  Presidency.  That  was  not  so  much  because 
of  the  private  failings  which  marked  his  robust  and 
generous  character,  as  because  in  days  of  artificial  party 
issues,  when  vital  questions  are  dealt  with  by  mere 
compromise,  high  office  seems  to  belong  of  right  to  men 
of  less  originality.  If  he  was  never  quite  so  great  as 
all  America  took  him  to  be,  it  was  not  for  want  of 
brains  or  of  honesty,  but  because  his  consuming  passion 
for  the  Union  at  all  costs  led  him  into  the  path  of 
least  apparent  risk  to  it.  Twice  as  Secretary  of  State 
(that  is,  chiefly,  Foreign  Minister)  he  showed  himself  a 
statesman,  but  above  all  he  was  an  orator  and  one  of 
those  rare  orators  who  accomplish  a  definite  task  by  their 
oratory.  In  his  style  he  carried  on  the  tradition  of 
English  Parliamentary  speaking,  and  developed  its 
vices  yet  further  ;  but  the  massive  force  of  argument 
behind  gave  him  his  real  power.  That  power  he 
devoted  to  the  education  of  the  people  in  a  feeling  for 
the  nation  and  for  its  greatness.  As  an  advocate  he 
had  appeared  in  great  cases  in  the  Supreme  Court. 
]ohn  Marshall,  the  Chief  Justice  from  1801  to  1835, 
brought  a  great  legal  mind  of  the  higher  type  to  the 
settlement  of  doubtful  points  in  the  Constitution,  and 
his  statesmanlike  judgments  did  much  both  to  strengthen 
the  United  States  Government  and  to  gain  public 
confidence  for  it.  It  was  a  memorable  work,  for  the 
power  of  the  Union  Government,  under  its  new  Con 
stitution,  lay  in  the  grip  of  the  Courts.  The  pleading 
of  the  young  Webster  contributed  much  to  this.  Later 
on  Webster,  and  a  school  of  followers,  of  whom  perhaps 
we  may  take  "  our  Elijah  Pogram  "  to  have  been  one, 
used  ceremonial  occasions,  on  which  Englishmen  only 


42  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

suffer  the  speakers,  for  the  purpose  of  inculcating  their 
patriotic  doctrine,  and  Webster  at  least  was  doing  good. 
His  greatest  speech,  upon  an  occasion  to  which  we  shall 
shortly  come,  was  itself  an  event.  Lincoln  found  in  it 
as  inspiring  a  political  treatise  as  many  Englishmen 
have  discovered  in  the  speeches  and  writings  of  Burke. 

Henry  Clay  was  a  slighter  but  more  attractive  person. 
He  was  apparently  the  first  American  public  man  whom 
his  countrymen  styled  "  magnetic,"  but  a  sort  of 
J  scheming  instability  caused  him  after  one  or  two  trials 
to  be  set  down  as  an  "  impossible  "  candidate  for  the 
Presidency.  As  a  dashing  young  man  from  the  West 
he  had  the  chief  hand  in  forcing  on  the  second  war  with 
Great  Britain,  from  1812  to  1814,  which  arose  out  of 
perhaps  insufficient  causes  and  ended  in  no  clear  result, 
but  which,  it  is  probable,  marked  a  stage  in  the  growth 
of  loyalty  to  America.  As  an  older  man  he  was  famed 
as  an  "  architect  of  compromises,"  for  though  he  strove 
for  emancipation  in  his  own  State,  Kentucky,  and 
dreamed  of  a  great  scheme  for  colonising  the  slaves  in 
Africa,  he  was  supremely  anxious  to  avert  collision 
between  North  and  South,  and  in  this  respect  was 
typical  of  his  generation.  But  about  1830  he  was 
chiefly  known  as  the  apostle  of  what  was  called  the 
"  American  policy."  This  was  a  policy  which  aimed  at 
using  the  powers  of  the  national  Government  for  the 
development  of  the  boundless  resources  of  the  country. 
Its  methods  comprised  a  national  banking  system,  the 
use  of  the  money  of  the  Union  on  great  public  works, 
and  a  protective  tariff,  which  it  was  hoped  might  chiefly 
operate  to  encotirage  promising  but  "  infant  "  industries 
and  to  tax  the  luxuries  of  the  rich.  Whatever  may  have 
been  the  merits  of  this  policy,  which  made  some 
commotion  for  a  few  years,  we  can  easily  understand 
that  it  appealed  to  the  imagination  of  young  Lincoln 
at  a  time  of  keen  political  energy  on  his  part  of  which 
we  have  but  meagre  details. 

A  third  celebrity  of  this  period,  in  his  own  locality 
a  still  more  powerful  man,  was  John  Caldwell  Calhoun, 
of  South  Carolina.  He  enjoyed  beyond  all  his  con- 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION     43 

temporaries  the  fame  of  an  intellectual  person.  Lincoln 
conceded  high  admiration  to  his  concise  and  penetrating 
phrases.  An  Englishwoman,  Harriet  Martineau,  who 
knew  him,  has  described  him  as  "  embodied  intellect." 
He  had  undoubtedly  in  full  measure  those  negative 
titles  to  respect  which  have  gone  far  in  America  to 
ensure  praise  from  the  public  and  the  historians  ;  for 
he  was  correct  and  austere,  and,  which  is  more,  kindly 
among  his  family  and  his  slaves.  He  is  credited,  too, 
with  an  observance  of  high  principle  in  public  life, 
which  it  might  be  difficult  to  illustrate  from  his  recorded 
actions.  But  the  warmer-blooded  Andrew  Jackson  set 
him  down  as  "  heartless,  selfish,  and  a  physical  coward," 
and  Jackson  could  speak  generously  of  an  opponent 
whom  he  really  knew.  His  intellect  must  have  been 
powerful  enough,  but  it  was  that  of  a  man  who  delights 
in  arguing,  and  delights  in  elaborate  deductions  from 
principles  which  he  is  too  proud  to  revise  ;  a  man,  too, 
who  is  fearless  in  accepting  conclusions  which  startle  or 
repel  the  vulgar  mind  ;  who  is  undisturbed  in  his  logical 
processes  by  good  sense,  healthy  sentiment,  or  any 
vigorous  appetite  for  truth.  Such  men  have  disciples 
who  reap  the  disgrace  which  their  masters  are  apt 
somehow  to  avoid  ;  they  give  the  prestige  of  wisdom 
and  high  thought  to  causes  which  could  not  otherwise 
earn  them.  A  Northern  soldier  came  back  wounded 
in  1865  and  described  to  the  next  soldier  in  the  hospital 
Calhoun's  monument  at  Charleston.  The  other  said  : 
"  What  you  saw  is  not  the  real  monument,  but  I  have 
seen  it.  It  is  the  desolated,  ruined  South.  .  .  .  That 
is  Calhoun's  real  monument." 

This  man  was  a  Radical,  and  known  as  the  successor 
of  Jefferson,  but  his  Radicalism  showed  itself  in  drawing 
inspiration  solely  from  the  popular  catchwords  of  his 
own  locality.  He  adored  the  Union,  but  it  was  to  be 
a  Union  directed  by  distinguished  politicians  from  the 
South  in  a  sectional  Southern  interest.  He  did  not 
originate,  but  he  secured  the  strength  of  orthodoxy  and 
fashion  to  a  tone  of  sentiment  and  opinion  which  for  a 
generation  held  undisputed  supremacy  in  the  heart  of 


44  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  South.  Americans  might  have  seemed  at  this  time 
to  be  united  in  a  curiously  exultant  national  self- 
consciousness,  but  though  there  was  no  sharp  division 
of  sections,  the  boasted  glory  of  the  one  America  meant 
to  many  planters  in  the  South  the  glory  of  their  own 
settled  and  free  life  with  their  dignified  equals  round 
them  and  their  often  contented  dependants  under  them. 
Plain  men  among  them  doubtless  took  things  as  they 
were,  and,  without  any  particular  wish  to  change  them, 
did  not  pretend  they  were  perfect.  But  it  is  evident 
that  in  a  widening  circle  of  clever  young  men  in  the 
South  the  claim  of  some  peculiar  virtue  for  Southern 
institutions  became  habitual  in  the  first  half  of  the 
|  nineteenth  century.  Their  way  of  life  was  beautiful 
Jin  their  eyes.  It  rested  upon  slavery.  Therefore 
I  slavery  was  a  good  thing.  It  was  wicked  even  to  criticise 
ft,  and  it  was  weak  to  apologise  for  it  or  to  pretend  that 
It  needed  reformation.  It  was  easy  and  it  became 
apparently  universal  for  the  different  Churches  of  the 
South  to  prostitute  the  Word  of  God  in  this  cause. 
Later  on  crude  notions  of  evolution  began  to  get  about 
in  a  few  circles  of  advanced  thought,  and  these  lent 
themselves  as  easily  to  the  same  purpose.  Loose, 
floating  thoughts  of  this  kind  might  have  mattered 
little.  Calhoun,  as  the  recognised  wise  man  of  the  old 
South,  concentrated  them  and  fastened  them  upon  its 
people  as  a  creed.  Glorification  of  "  our  institution 
at  the  South  "  became  the  main  principle  of  Southern 
politicians,  and  any  conception  that  there  may  ever 
have  been  of  a  task  for  constructive  statesmanship, 
in  solving  the  negro  problem,  passed  into  oblivion  under 
the  influence  of  his  revered  reasoning  faculty. 

But,  of  his  dark  and  dangerous  sort,  Calhoun  was  an 
able  man.  He  foresaw  early  that  the  best  weapon  of 
the  common  interest  of  the  slave  States  lay  in  the  rights 
which  might  be  claimed  for  each  individual  State  against 
the  Union.  The  idea  that  a  discontented  State  might 
secede  from  the  Union  was  not  novel — it  had  been 
mooted  in  New  England,  during  the  last  war  against 
Great  Britain,  and,  curiously  enough,  among  the 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    45 

rump  of  the  old  Federalist  party,  but  it  was  generally 
discounted.  Calhoun  first  brought  it  into  prominence, 
veiled  in  an  elaborate  form  which  some  previous  South 
Carolinan  had  devised.  The  occasion  had  nothing  to 
do  with  slavery.  It  concerned  Free  Trade,  a  very 
respectable  issue,  but  so  clearly  a  minor  issue  that  to 
break  up  a  great  country  upon  it  would  have  gone 
beyond  the  limit  of  solemn  frivolity,  and  Calhoun  must 
be  taken  to  have  been  forging  an  implement  with  which 
his  own  section  of  the  States  could  claim  and  extort 
concessions  from  the  Union.  A  protective  tariff  had 
been  passed  in  1828.  The  Southern  States,  which  would 
have  to  pay  the  protective  duties  but  did  not  profit  by 
them,  disliked  it.  Calhoun  and  others  took  the_intelli- 
gible  but  too  refined  point,  that  the  powers  of  Congress 
under  the  ConstituTioi 


but  not  a  tariffjnr  a  protective-purpose.  Every  State, 
Calhcmn^JJei^^  right 

to  protect  itself  against  an  Act  of  Congress  which  it 
deemed  unconstitutional.  Let  such  a  State,  in  special 
Convention,  "  nullify  "  the  ___  Act—  of  Congress.  Let 
Congress  then,  unless  it  compromised  the  matter,  submit 
its  Act  to  the  people  in  the  form  of  an  Amendment  to  the 
Constitution.  It  would  then  require  a  three-fourths 
majority  of  all  the  States  to  pass  the  obnoxious  Act. 
Last  but  not  least,  if  the  Act  was  passed,  the  protesting 
State  had,  Calhoun  claimed,  the  right  to  secede  from  the 
Union. 

Controversy  over  this  tariff  raged  for  fully  four  years, 
and  had  a  memorable  issue.  In  the  course  of  1830  the 
doctrine  of  "  nullification  "  and  "  secession  "  was 
discussed  in  the  Senate,  and  the  view  of  Calhoun  was 
expounded  by  one  Senator  Hayne.  Webster  answered 
him  in  a  speech  which  he  meant  should  become  a  popular 
classic,  and  which  did  become  so.  He  set  forth  his  own 
doctrine  of  the  Union  and  appealed  to  national  against 
State  loyalty  in  the  most  influential  oration  that 
was  perhaps  ever  made.  "  His  utterance,"  writes 
President  Wilson,  "sent  a  thrill  through  all  the  East 
and  North  which  was  unmistakably  a  thrill  of  triumph. 


46  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Men  were  glad  because  of  what  he  had  said.  He  had 
touched  the  national  self-consciousness,  awakened  it, 
and  pleased  it  with  a  morning  vision  of  its  great  tasks 
and  certain  destiny."  Later  there  came  in  the  President, 
the  redoubtable  Andrew  Jackson,  the  most  memorable 
President  between  Jefferson  and  Lincoln.  He  said  very 
;  little — only,  on  Jefferson's  birthday  he  gave  the  toast, 
"  Our  Federal  Union ;  it  must  be  preserved."  But 
when  in  1832,  in  spite  of  concessions  by  Congress,  a 
Convention  was  summoned  in  South  Carolina  to 
"  nullify  "  the  tariff,  he  issued  the  appropriate  orders  to 
the  United  States  Army,  in  case  such  action  was  carried 
out,  and  it  is  understood  that  he  sent  Calhoun  private 
word  that  he  would  be  the  first  man  to  be  hanged  for 
treason.  Nullification  quietly  collapsed.  The  North 
was  thrilled  still  more  than  by  Webster's  oratory,  and 
as  not  a  single  other  State  showed  signs  of  backing 
South  Carolina,  it  became  thenceforth  the  fixed  belief 
of  the  North  that  the  Union  was  recognised  as  in  law 
indissoluble,  as  Webster  contended  it  was.  None  the 
less  the  idea  of  secession  had  been  planted,  and  planted 
in  a  fertile  soil. 

General  Andrew  Jackson,  whose  other  great  achieve 
ments  must  now  be  told,  was  not  an  intellectual  person, 
but  his  ferocious  and,  in  the  literal  sense,  shocking 
character  is  refreshing  to  the  student  of  this  period. 
He  had  been  in  his  day  the  typical  product  of  the  West — 
a  far  wilder  West  than  that  from  which  Lincoln  later 
came.  Originally  a  lawyer,  he  had  won  martial  fame 
in  fights  with  Indians  and  in  the  celebrated  victory 
over  the  British  forces  at  New  Orleans.  He  was  a 
sincere  Puritan ;  and  he  had  a  courtly  dignity  of 
manner  ;  but  he  was  of  arbitrary  and  passionate  temper, 
and  he  was  a  sanguinary  duellist.  His  most  savage 
duels,  it  should  be  added,  concerned  the  honour  of  a 
lady  whom  he  married  chivalrously,  and  loved  devotedly 
to  the  end.  The  case  that  can  be  made  for  his  many 
arbitrary  acts  shows  them  in  some  instances  to  have 
been  justifiable,  and  shows  him  in  general  to  have  been 
honest. 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN   NATION    47 

When  in  1824  Jackson  had  expected  to  become 
President,  and,  owing  to  proceedings  which  do  not  now 
matter,  John  Quincy  Adams,  son  of  a  former  President, 
and  himself  a  remarkable  man,  was  made  President 
instead  of  him,  Jackson  resolved  to  overthrow  the  ruling 
class  of  Virginian  country  gentlemen  and  Boston  city 
magnates  which  seemed  to  him  to  control  Government, 
and  to  call  into  life  a  real  democracy.  To  this  end 
he  created  a  new  party,  against  which  of  course  an 
opposition  party  arose. 

Neither  of  the  new  parties  was  in  any  sense  either 
/  aristocratic  or  democratic.  "  The  Democracy,"  or 
\  Democratic  party,  has  continued  in  existence  ever  since, 
Vand  through  most  of  Lincoln's  life  ruled  America.  In 
trying  to  fix  the  character  of  a  party  in  a  foreign  country 
we  cannot  hope  to.be  exact  in  our  portraiture.  At  the 
first  start,  however,  this  party  was  engaged  in  com 
bating  certain  tendencies  to  Government  interference 
in  business.  It  was  more  especially  hostile  to  a  National 
Bank,  which  Jackson  himself  regarded  as  a  most 
dangerous  form  of  alliance  between  the  administration 
and  the  richest  class.  Of  the  growth  of  what  may  be 
called  the  money  power  in  American  politics  he  had  an 
intense,  indeed  prophetic,  dread.  Martin  Van  Buren, 
his  friend  and  successor,  whatever  else  he  may  have 
been,  was  a  sound  economist  of  what  is  now  called  the 
old  school,  and  on  a  financial  issue  he  did  what  few  men 
in  his  office  have  done,  he  deliberately  sacrificed  his 
popularity  to  his  principles.  Beyond  this  the  party 
was  and  has  continued  prone,  in  a  manner  which  we 
had  better  not  too  clearly  define,  to  insist  upon  the 
restrictions  of  the  Constitution,  whether  in  the  interest 
of  individual  liberty  or  of  State  rights.  This  tendency 
was  disguised  at  the  first  by  the  arbitrary  action  of 
Jackson's  own  proceedings,  for  Jackson  alone  among 
Presidents  displayed  the  sentiments  of  what  may  be 
called  a  popular  despot.  Its  insistence  upon  State 
rights,  aided  perhaps  by  its  dislike  of  Protection, 
attracted  to  it  the  leading  politicians  of  the  South, 
who  in  the  main  dominated  its  counsels,  though  later 


48  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

on  they  liked  to  do  it  through  Northern  instruments. 
But  it  must  not  in  the  least  be  imagined  that  either 
party  was  Northern  or  Southern  ;  for  there  were  many 
Whigs  in  the  South,  and  very  many  Democrats  in  the 
North.  Moreover,  it  should  be  clearly  grasped,  though 
it  is  hard,  that  among  Northern  Democrats  insistence 
on  State  rights  did  not  involve  the  faintest  leaning 
towards  the  doctrine  of  secession  ;  on  the  contrary  a 
typical  Democrat  would  believe  that  these  limitations 
to  the  power  of  the  Union  were  the  very  things  that 
gave  it  endurance  and  strength.  Slavery,  moreover, 
had  friends  and  foes  in  both  parties.  If  we  boldly 
attempted  to  define  the  prevailing  tone  of  the  Democrats 
we  might  say  that,  while  they  and  their  opponents 
expressed  loyalty  to  the  Union  and  the  Constitution, 
the  Democrats  would  be  prone  ta  lay  the  emphasis 
upon  the  Constitution.  Whatever  might  be  the  case 
with  an  average  Whig,  a  man  like  Lincoln  would  be 
stirred  in  his  heart  by  the  general  spirit  of  the  country's 
institutions,  while  the  typical  Democrat  of  that  time 
would  dwell  affectionately  on  legal  instruments  and  the 
formal  maxims  in  which  that  spirit  was  embodied. 

Of  the  Whigs  it  is  a  little  harder  to  speak  definitely, 
nor  is  it  very  necessary,  for  in  two  only  out  of  seven 
Presidential  elections  did  they  elect  their  candidate, 
and  in  each  case  that  candidate  then  died,  and  in  1854 
they  perished  as  a  party  utterly  and  for  ever.  Just  for 
a  time  they  were  identified  with  the  "  American  policy  " 
of  Clay.  When  that  passed  out  of  favour  they  never 
really  attempted  to  formulate  any  platform,  or  to  take 
permanently  any  very  definite  stand.  They  nevertheless 
had  the  adherence  of  the  ablest  men  of  the  country, 
and,  as  an  opposition  party  to  a  party  in  power  which 
furnished  much  ground  for  criticism,  they  possessed  an 
attraction  for  generous  youth. 

The  Democrats  at  once,  and  the  Whigs  not  long  after 
them,  created  elaborate  party  machines,  on  the  need  of 
which  Jackson  insisted  as  the  only  means  of  really 
giving  influence  to  the  common  people.  The  prevailing 
system  and  habit  of  local  self-government  made  gjich 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    49 

organisation  easy.  Men  of  one  party  in  a  township  or 
in  a  county  assembled,  formulated  their  opinions,  and 
sent  delegates  with  instructions,  more  or  less  precise,  to 
party  conventions  for  larger  areas,  these  would  send 
delegates  to  the  State  Convention,  and  these  in  turn  to 
the  National  Convention  of  the  Party.  The  party 
candidates  for  the  Presidency,  as  well  as  for  all  other 
elective  positions,  were  and  are  thus  chosen,  and  the 
party  "  platform  "  or  declaration  of  policy  was  and  is 
thus  formulated.  Such  machinery,  which  in  England 
is  likely  always  to  play  a  less  important  part,  has 
acquired  an  evil  name.  At  the  best  there  has  always 
been  a  risk  that  a  "  platform  "  designed  to  detach  voters 
from  the  opposite  party  will  be  an  insincere  and 
eviscerated  document,  by  which  active  public  opinion 
is  rather  muzzled  than  expressed.  There  has  been  a 
risk  too  that  the  "  available  "  candidate  should  be 
some  blameless  nonentity,  to  whom  no  one  objects, 
and  whom  therefore  no  one  really  wants.  But  it 
must  be  observed  that  the  rapidity  with  which  such 
organisation  was  taken  up  betokened  the  prevalence  of 
a  widespread  and  keen  interest  in  political  affairs. 

The  days  of  really  great  moneyed  interests  and 
of  corruption  of  the  gravest  sort  were  as  yet  far  distant, 
but  one  demoralising  influence  was  imposed  upon  the 
new  party  system  by  its  author  at  its  birth.  Jackson, 
in  his  perpetual  fury,  believed  that  office  holders  under 
the  more  or  less  imaginary  ruling  clique  that  had  held 
sway  were  a  corrupt  gang,  and  he  began  to  turn  them 
out.  He  was  encouraged  to  extend  to  the  whole 
country  a  system  which  had  prevailed  in  New  York 
and  with  which  Van  Buren  was  too  familiar.  "  To  the 
victors  belong  the  spoils,"  exclaimed  a  certain  respect 
able  Mr.  Marcy.  A  wholesale  dismissal  of  office  holders 
large  and  small,  and  replacement  of  them  by  sound 
Democrats,  soon  took  place.  Once  started,  the  "  spoils 
system "  could  hardly  be  stopped.  Thenceforward 
there  was  a  standing  danger  that  the  party  machine 
would  be  in  the  hands  of  a  crew  of  jobbers  and  dingy 
hunters  after  petty  offices.  England,  of  course  has 


So  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

had  and  now  has  practices  theoretically  as  indefensible, 
but  none  possessing  any  such  sinister  importance. 
It  is  hard,  therefore,  for  us  to  conceive  how  little  of 
really  vicious  intent  was  necessary  to  set  this  disastrous 
influence  going.  There  was  no  trained  Civil  Service 
with  its  unpartisan  traditions.  In  the  case  of  offices 
corresponding  to  those  of  our  permanent  heads  of 
departments  it  seemed  reasonable  that  the  official 
should,  like  his  chief  the  Minister  concerned,  be  a 
person  in  harmony  with  the  President.  As  to  the 
smaller  offices — the  thousands  of  village  postmaster- 
ships  and  so  forth — one  man  was  likely  to  do  the  work 
as  well  as  another  ;  the  dispossessed  official  could,  in 
the  then  condition  of  the  country,  easily  find  another 
equally  lucrative  employment  ;  "  turn  and  turn  about  " 
seemed  to  be  the  rule  of  fair  play. 

There  were  now  few  genuine  issues  in  politics.  Com 
promise  on  vital  questions  was  understood  to  be  the 
highest  statesmanship.  The  Constitution  itself,  with 
its  curious  system  of  checks  and  balances,  rendered  it 
difficult  to  bring  anything  to  pass.  Added  to  this  was 
a  party  system  with  obvious  natural  weaknesses, 
infected  from  the  first  with  a  dangerous  malady.  The 
political  life,  which  lay  on  the  surface  of  the  national 
life  of  America,  thus  began  to  assume  an  air  of  futility, 
and,  it  must  be  added,  of  squalor.  Only,  Englishmen, 
recollecting  the  feebleness  and  corruption  which  marked 
their  aristocratic  government  through  a  great  part  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  must  not  enlarge  their  phylac 
teries  at  the  expense  of  American  democracy.  And  it 
is  yet  more  important  to  remember  that  the  fittest 
machinery  for  popular  government,  the  machinery 
through  which  the  real  judgment  of  the  people  will 
prevail,  can  only  by  degrees  and  after  many  failures  be 
devised.  Popular  government  was  then  young,  and 
it  is  young  still. 

So  much  for  the  great  world  of  politics  in  those  days. 
But  in  or  about  1830  a  Quaker  named  Lundy  had,  as 
Quakers  used  to  say,  "  a  concern  "  to  walk  125  miles 
through  the  snow  of  a  New  England  winter  and  speak 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    51 

his  mind  to  William  Lloyd  Garrison.  Garrison  was  a 
poor  man  who,  like  Franklin,  had  raised  himself  as  a 
working  printer,  and  was  now  occupied  in  philanthropy. 
Stirred  up  by  Lundy,  he  succeeded  after  many  painful 
experiences,  in  gaol  and  among  mobs,  in  publishing  in 
Boston  on  January  I,  1831,  the  first  number  of  the 
Liberator.  In  it  he  said  :  "I  shall  strenuously  con 
tend  for  the  immediate  enfranchisement  of  our  slave 
population.  I  will  be  as  hard  as  truth  and  as  un 
compromising  as  justice.  I  will  not  equivocate  ;  I  will 
not  excuse  ;  I  will  not  retreat  a  single  inch  ;  and  I 
will  be  heard."  This  was  the  beginning  of  the  new  ^ 
Abolitionist  movement.  The  Abolitionists,  in  the  main, 
were  impracticable  people  ;  Garrison  in  the  end  proved 
otherwise.  Under  the  existing  Constitution,  they  had 
nothing  to  propose  but  that  the  free  States  should 
withdraw  from  "  their  covenant  with  death  and  agree 
ment  with  hell  " — in  other  words,  from  the  Union, — 
whereby  they  would  not  have  liberated  one  slave. 
They  included  possibly  too  many  of  that  sort  who 
would  seek  salvation  by  repenting  of  other  men's  sins. 
But  even  these  did  not  indulge  this  propensity  at  their 
ease,  for  by  this  time  the  politicians,  the  polite  world, 
the  mass  of  the  people,  the  churches  (even  in  Boston), 
not  merely  avoided  the  dangerous  topic  ;  they  angrily 
proscribed  it.  The  Abolitionists  took  their  lives  in 
their  hands,  and  sometimes  lost  them.  Only  two  men 
of  standing  helped  them  :  Channing,  the  great  preacher, 
who  sacrificed  thereby  a  fashionable  congregation  ;  and 
Adams,  the  sour,  upright,  able  ex-President,  the  only 
ex-President  who  ever  made  for  himself  an  after-career 
in  Congress/  In  1852  a  still  more  potent  ally  came  to 
theirjielp,  a^oofTa^y^MfsT^eecher  Stowe,  who  in  that 
year  published  "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,"  often  said  to 
have  influenced  opinion  more  than  any  other  book  of 
modern  times.  Broadly  speaking,  they  accomplished 
two  tm'iigsr — H  they  did  not  gain  love  in  quarters 
where  they  might  have  looked  for  it,  they  gained  the 
very  valuable  hatred  of  their  enemies  ;  for  they  goaded 
Southern  politicians  to  fury  and  madness,  of  which  the 


$2  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

first  symptom  was  their  effort  to  suppress  Abolitionist 
Petitions  to  Congress.  But  above  all  they  Educated  in 
their  labour  of  thirty  years  a  school  of  opinion,  not 
entirely  in  agreement  with  them  but  ready  one  day 
to  revolt  with  decision  from  continued  complicity  in 
wrong.^ 

6.  Slavery  and  Southern  Society. 

In  the  midst  of  this  growing  America,  a  portion, 
by  no  means  sharply  marked  off,  and  accustomed  to 
the  end  to  think  itself  intensely  American,  was  dis 
tinguished  by  a  peculiar  institution.  What  was  the 
character  of  that  institution  as  it  presented  itself  in 
1830  and  onwards  ? 

Granting,  as  many  slave  holders  did,  though  their 
leaders  always  denied  it,  that  slavery  originated  in  foul 
wrongs  and  rested  legally  upon  a  vile  principle,  what 
did  it  look  like  in  its  practical  working  ?  Most  of_us 
have  received  from  two  different  sources  two  broad  but 
vivid  general  impressions  on  this  subject,  which  seem 
hard  to  reconcile  but  which  are  both  in  the  main  true, 
On  the  one  hand,  a  visitor  from  England  or  the  NoVth, 
coming  on  a  visit  to  the  South,  or  in  earlier  days  to  the 
British  West  Indies,  expecting  perhaps  to  see  all  the 
horror  of  slavery  at  a  glance,  would  be,  as  a  young 
British  officer  once  wrote  home,  "  most  agreeably 
undeceived  as  to  the  situation  of  these  poor  people." 
He  would  discern  at  once  that  a  Southern. gentleman 
had  no  more  notion  of  using  his  legal  privilege  to  be 
cruel  to  his  slave  than  he  himself  had  of  overdriving 
his  old  horse.  He  might  easily  on  the  contrary  find 
quite  ordinary  slave  owners  who  had  a  very  decided 
sense  of  responsibility  in  regard  to  their  human  chattels. 
Around  his  host's  house,  where  the  owner's  children, 
petted  by  a  black  nurse,  played  with  the  little  black 
children  or  with  some  beloved  old  negro,  he  might  see 
that  pretty  aspect  of  "  our  institution  at  the  South," 
which  undoubtedly  created  in  many  young  Southerners 
as  they  grew  up  a  certain  amount  of  genuine  sentiment 
in  favour  of  slavery.  Riding  wider  afield  he  might  be 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    53 

struck,  as  General  Sherman  was,  with  the  contentment 
of  the  negroes  whom  he  met  on  the  plantations.  On 
enquiry  he  would  learn  that  the  slave  in  old  age  was  sure 
of  food  and  shelter  and  free  from  work,  and  that  as 
he  approached  old  age  his  task  was  systematically 
diminished.  As  to  excessive  toil  at  any  time  of  life, 
he  would  perhaps  conclude  that  it  was  no  easy  thing 
to  drive  a  gang  of  Africans  really  hard.  He  would  be 
assured,  quite  incorrectly,  that  the  slave's  food  and 
comfort  generally  were  greater  than  those  of  factory 
workers  in  the  North,  and,  perhaps  only  too  truly, 
that  his  privations  were  less  than  those  of  the  English 
agricultural  labourer  at  that  time.  A  wide  and  careful 
survey  of  the  subject  was  made  by  Frederick  Law 
Olmsted,  a  New  York  farmer,  who  wrote  what  but  for 
their  gloomy  subject  would  be  among  the  best  books  of 
travel.  He  presents  to  us  the  picture  of  a  prevailingly 
sullen,  sapless,  brutish  life,  but  certainly  not  of  acute 
misery  or  habitual  oppression.  A  Southerner  old 
enough  to  remember  slavery  would  probably  not  question 
the  accuracy  of  his  details,  but  would  insist,  very  likely 
with  truth,  that  there  was  more  human  happiness  there 
than  an  investigator  on  such  a  quest  would  readily 
discover.  Even  on  large  plantations  in  the  extreme 
South,  where  the  owner  only  lived  part  of  the  year, 
and  most  things  had  to  be  left  to  an  almost  always 
unsatisfactory  overseer,  the  verdict  of  the  observer  7 
was  apt  to  be  "  not  so  bad  as  I  expected."  L 

(On  the  other  hand,  many  of  us  know  Longfellow's 
grim  poem  of  the  Hunted  Negro.  \  It  is  a  true  picture  of 
the  life  led  in  the  Dismal  Swamps  of  Virginia  by  numbers 
of  skulking  fugitives,  till  the  industry  of  negro-hunting, 
conducted  with  hounds  of  considerable  value,  ultimately 
made  their  lairs  untenable.  The  scenes  in  the  auction 
room  where,  perhaps  on  the  death  or  failure  of  their 
owner,  husbands  and  wives,  parents  and  children,  were 
constantly  being  severed,  and  negresses  were  habitually 
puffed  as  brood  mares  ;  the  gentleman  who  had  lately 
sold  his  half-brother,  to  be  sent  far  south,  because  he 
was  impudent  ;  the  devilish  cruelty  with  which  almost 


54  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  only  recorded  slave  insurrection  was  stamped  out ; 
the  chase  and  capture  and  return  in  fetters  of  slaves 
who  had  escaped  north,  or,  it  might  be,  of  free  negroes 
in  their  place  ;  the  advertisements  for  such  runaways, 
which  Dickens  collected,  and  which  described  each  by 
his  scars  or  mutilations ;  the  systematic  slave  breeding, 
for  the  supply  of  the  cotton  States,  which  had  become  a 
staple  industry  of  the  once  glorious  Virginia  ;  the  de 
mand  arising  for  the  restoration  of  the  African  slave 
trade — all  these  were  realities.  The  Southern  people,  in 
the  phrase  of  President  Wilson,  "  knew  that  their  lives 
were  honourable,  their  relations  with  their  slaves 
humane,  their  responsibility  for  the  existence  of  slavery 
amongst  them  remote  "  ;  they  burned  with  indignation 
when  the  whole  South  was  held  responsible  for  the 
occasional  abuses  of  slavery.  But  the  harsh  philan 
thropist,  who  denounced  them  indiscriminately,  merely 
dwelt  on  those  aspects  of  slavery  which  came  to  his 
knowledge  or  which  he  actually  saw  on  the  border  line. 
And  the  occasional  abuses,  however  occasional,  were 
made  by  the  deliberate  choice  of  Southern  statesman 
ship  an  essential  part  of  the  institution.  Honourable 
and  humane  men  in  the  South  scorned  exceedingly  the 
slave  hunter  and  the  slave  dealer.  A  candid  slave 
owner,  discussing  "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,"  found  one 
detail  flagrantly  unfair  ;  the  ruined  master  would  have 
had  to  sell  his  slaves  to  the  brute,  Legree,  but  for  the 
world  he  would  not  have  shaken  hands  with  him. 
(^  Your  children,"  exclaimed  Lincoln,  "  may  play  with 
the  little  black  children,  but  they  must  not  play  with 
his  " — the  slave  dealer's,  or  the  slave  driver's,  or  the 
slave  hunter's.  By  that  fact  alone,  as  he  bitingly  but 
unanswerably  insisted,  the  whole  decent  society  of  the 
South  condemned  the  foundation  on  which  it  rested?) 

It  is  needless  to  discuss  just  how  dark  or  how  fair 
American  slavery  in  its  working  should  be  painted. 
The  moderate  conclusions  which,  are  quite  sufficient  for 
our  purpose  are  uncontested.  (  First,  this  much  must 
certainly  be  conceded  to  those  who  would  defend  the 
slave  system,  that  in  the  case  of  the  average  slave  it 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    55 

was  very  doubtful  whether  his  happiness  (apart  frorrf| 
that  of  future  generations)  could  be  increased  by 
suddenly  turning  him  into  a  free  man  working  for  a 
wage  ;  justice  would  certainly  have  demanded  that— 
the  change  should  be  accompanied  by  other  provisions 
for  his  benefit.  But,  ^econdly,  on  the  refractory  negro,"1 
more  vicious,  or  sometimes,  one  may  suspect,  more 
manly  than  his  fellows,  the  system  was  likely  to  act 
barbarously.  (Thirdly,  every  slave  family  was  exposed 
to  the  risk,  on  such  occasions  as  the  death  or  great 
impoverishment  of  its  owner,  of  being  ruthlessly  torn 
asunder,  and  the  fact  that  negroes  often  rebounded  or 
seemed  to  rebound  from  sorrows  of  this  sort  with 
surprising  levity  does  not  much  lessen  the  horror  of  it. 
(fourthly,  it  is  inherent  in  slavery  that  its  burden 
should  be  most  felt  precisely  by  the  best  minds  and 
strongest  characters  among  the  slaves.  And,  though  the 
capacity  of  the  negroes  for  advancement  could  not  then 
and  cannot  yet  be  truly  measured,  yet  it  existed,  and 
the  policy  of  the  South  shut  the  door  upon  it.  /Lastly, 
the  system  abounded  in  brutalising  influences  upon  a 
large  number  of  white  people  who  were  accessory  to  it, 
and  notoriously  it  degraded  the  poor  or  "  mean  whites," 
for  whom  it  left  no  industrial  opening,  and  among  whom 
it  caused  work  to  be  despised. 

A  There  is  thus  no  escape  from  Lincoln's  judgment :  T 
IJ^lf  slavery  is  not  wrong,  nothing  is  wrong."  \  It  does 
not  follow  that  the  way  to  right  the  wrong  was  simple, 
or  that  instant  and  unmitigated  emancipation  was  the 
best  way.  But  it  does  follow  that,  failing  this,  it  was.- 
for  the  statesmen  of  the  South  t©  devise  a  policy  by 
which  the  most  flagrant  evils  should  be  stepped,  and, 
however  cautiously  and  experimentally,  the  raising  of 
the  status  of  the  slave  should  be  proceeded  with.  It 
does  not  follow  that  the  people  who,  on  one  pretext  or 
another,  shut  their  eyes  to  the  evil  of  the  system,  while 
they  tried  to  keep  their  personal  dealing  humane,  can 
be  sweepingly  condemned  by  any  man.  But  it  does 
follow  that  a  deliberate  and  sustained  policy  which, 
neglecting  all  reform,  strove  at  all  costs  to  perpetuate 


56  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

!the  system  and  extend  it  to  wider  regions,  was  as 
/  criminal  a  policy  as  ever  lay  at  the  door  of  any  statesmen. 
I  And  this,  in  fact,  became  the  policy  of  the  Smith. 

"  The  South "  meant,  for  political  purposes,  the 
owners  of  land  and  slaves  in  the  greater  part  of  the 
States  in  which  slavery  was  lawful.  The  poor  whites 
never  acquired  the  political  importance  of  the  working 
classes  in  the  North,  and  count  for  little  in  the  story. 
Some  of  the  more  northerly  slave  States  partook  in  a 
greater  degree  of  the  conditions  and  ideas  of  the  North 
and  were  doubtfully  to  be  reckoned  with  the  South. 
Moreover,  there  is  a  tract  of  mountainous  country, 
lying  between  the  Atlantic  sea-board  and  the  basin  of 
the  Mississippi  and  extending  southwards  to  the  borders 
of  Georgia  and  Alabama,  of  which  the  very  vigorous 
and  independent  inhabitants  were  and  are  in  many 
ways  a  people  apart,  often  cherishing  to  this  day  family 
feuds  which  are  prosecuted  in  the  true  spirit  of  the 
Icelandic  Sagas. 

The  South,  excluding  these  districts,  was  pre 
dominantly  Democratic  in  politics,  and  its  leaders  owed 
some  allegiance  to  the  tradition  of  Radicals  like  Jefferson. 
But  it  was  none  the  less  proud  of  its  aristocracy  and 
of  the  permeating  influence  of  aristocratic  manners  and 
traditions.  A  very  large  number  of  Southerners  felt 
themselves  to  be  ladies  and  gentlemen,  and  felt  further 
that  there  were  few  or  none  like  them  among  the 
"  Yankee  "  traders  of  the  North.  A  claim  of  that  sort 
is  likely  to  be  aggressively  made  by  those  who  have 
least  title  to  make  it,  and,  as  strife  between  North  and 
South  grew  hotter,  the  gentility  of  the  latter  infected 
with  additional  vulgarity  the  political  controversy  of 
private  life  and  even  of  Congress.  But,  as  observant 
Northerners  were  quite  aware,  these  pretensions  had  a 
foundation  of  fact.  An  Englishman,  then  or  now,  in 
chance  meetings  with  Americans  of  either  section,  would 
at  once  be  aware  of  something  indefinable  in  their 
bearing  to  which  he  was  a  stranger  ;  but  in  the  case  of 
the  Southerner  the  strangeness  would  often  have  a 
positive  charm,  such  as  may  be  found  also  among 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    57 

people  of  the  Old  World  under  southern  latitudes  and 
relatively  primitive  conditions.  Newly -gotten  and 
ill-carried  wealth  was  in  those  days  (Mr.  Olmsted,  of 
New  York  State,  assures  us)  as  offensive  in  the  more 
recently  developed  and  more  prosperous  parts  of  the 
South  as  in  New  York  City  itself ;  and  throughout  the 
South  sound  instruction  and  intellectual  activity  were 
markedly  lacking — indeed,  there  is  no  serious  Southern 
literature  by  which  we  can  check  these  impressions  of 
his.  Comparing  the  masses  of  moderately  well-to-do 
and  educated  people  with  whom  he  associated  in  the 
North  and  in  the  South,  he  finds  them  both  free  from 
the  peculiar  vulgarity  which,  we  may  be  pained  to 
know,  he  had  discovered  among  us  in  England  ;  he 
finds  honesty  and  dishonesty  in  serious  matters  of 
conduct  as  prevalent  in  one  section  as  in  the  other  ; 
he  finds  the  Northerner  better  taught  and  more  alert 
in  mind  ;  but  he  ascribes  to  him  an  objectionable  quality 
of  "  smartness,"  a  determination  to  show  you  that 
he  is  a  stirring  and  pushing  fellow,  from  which  the 
Southerner  is  wholly  free  ;  and  he  finds  that  the 
Southerner  has  derived  from  home  influences  and  from 
boarding  schools  in  which  the  influence  of  many  similar 
homes  is  concentrated,  not  indeed  any  great  refinement, 
but  a  manner  which  is  "  more  true,  more  quiet,  more 
modestly  self-assured,  more  dignified."  This  advantage, 
we  are  to  understand,  is  diffused  over  a  comparatively 
larger  class  than  in  England.  Beyond  this  he  discerns  in  a 
few  parts  of  the  South  and  notably  in  South  Carolina  a 
somewhat  inaccessible,  select  society,  of  which  the  nucleus 
is  formed  by  a  few  (incredibly  few)  old  Colonial  families 
which  have  not  gone  under,  and  which  altogether  is  so 
small  that  some  old  gentlewomen  can  enumerate  all  the 
members  of  it.  Few  as  they  are,  these  form  "  unques 
tionably  a  wealthy  and  remarkably  generous,  refined,  and 
accomplished  first  class,  clinging  with  some  pertinacity, 
although  with  too  evident  an  effort,  to  the  traditional 
manners  and  customs  of  an  established  gentry." 

No   doubt   the   sense    of   high   breeding,   which   was 
common  in   the   South,  went  beyond   mere   manners  ; 


S8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

it  played  its  part  in  making  the  struggle  of  the  Southern 
population,  including  the  "  mean  whites,"  in  the  Civil 
War  one  of  the  most  heroic,  if  one  of  the  most  mistaken, 
in  which  a  whole  population  has  ever  been  engaged  ; 
it  went  along  with  integrity  and  a  high  average  of 
governing  capacity  among  public  men  ;  and  it  fitted 
the  gentry  of  the  South  to  contribute,  when  they  should 
choose,  an  element  of  great  value  to  the  common  life 
of  America.  As  it  was,  the  South  suffered  to  the  full 
the  political  degeneration  which  threatens  every  power 
ful  class  which,  with  a  distinct  class  interest  of  its  own, 
is  secluded  from  real  contact  with  competing  classes 
with  other  interests  and  other  ideas.  It  is  not  to  be 
assumed  that  all  individual  Southerners  liked  the 
policy  which  they  learnt  to  support  in  docile  masses. 
But  their  very  qualities  of  loyalty  made  them  the 
more  ready,  under  accepted  and  respected  leaders,  to 
adopt  political  aims  and  methods,  which  no  man  now 
recalls  without  regret. 
t  ^The  connection  between  slavery  and  politics  was  this  : 

1  •  11  •  1  O  1  1  111 


as  population  slowly  grew  in  the  South  and  as  the  land 
in  the  older  States  became  to  some  extent  exhausted, 
the  desire  for  fresh  territory  in  which  cultivation  by 
slaves  could  flourish  became  stronger  and  stronger. 
This  was  the  reason  for  which  the  South  became  in 
creasingly  aware  of  a  sectional  interest  in  politics. 
In  all  other  respects  the  community  of  public  interests, 
of  business  dealings,  and  of  general  intercourse  was  as 
great  between  North  and  South  as  between  East  and 
West.  It  is  certain  that  throughout  the  South,  with 
the  doubtful  exception  of  South  Carolina,  political 
instinct  and  patriotic  pride  would  have  made  the  idea  of 
separation  intolerable  upon  any  ground  except  that  of 
slavery.  In  regard  to  this  matter  of  dispute  a  peculiar 
phenomenon  is  to  be  observed.  The  quarrel  grew  not  out 
of  any  steady  opposition  between  North  and  South, 
but  out  of  the  habitual  domination  of  the  country  by 
the  South  and  the  long-continued  submission  of  the 
North  to  that  domination. 

For  the  North  had  its  full  share  of  blame  for  the 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    59 

long  course  of  proceedings  which  prepared  the  coming 
tragedy,  and  the  most  impassioned  writers  on  the  side 
of  the  Union  during  the  Civil  War  have  put  that  blame 
highest.  The  South  became  arrogant  and  wrong- 
headed,  and  no  defence  is  possible  for  the  chief  acts  of 
Southern  policy  which  will  be  recorded  later  ;  but  the 
North  was  abject.  To  its  own  best  sons  it  seemed  to 
have  lost  both  its  conscience  and  its  manhood,  and  to 
be  stifled  in  the  coils  of  its  own  miserable  political 
apparatus.  Certainly  the  prevailing  attitude  of  the 
Northern  to  the  Southern  politicians  was  that  of 
•truckling.  And  Southerners  who  went  to  Washington 
had  a  further  reason  for  acquiring  a  fatal  sense  of 
superiority  to  the  North.  The  tradition  of  popular 
government  which  maintained  itself  in  the  South 
caused  men  who  were  respected,  in  private  life,  and 
were  up  to  a  point  capable  leaders,  who  were,  in  short, 
representative,  to  be  sent  to  Congress  and  to  be  kept 
there.  The  childish  perversion  of  popular  government 
which  took  hold  of  the  newer  and  more  unsettled  popula 
tion  in  the  North  led  them  to  send  to  Congress  an  ever- 
changing  succession  of  unmeritable  and  sometimes  shady 
people.  The  eventual  stirring  of  the  mihd  of  the  North 
which  so  closely  concerns  this  biography  was  a  thing 
hard  to  bring  about,  and  to  the  South  it  brought  a 
great  shock  of  surprise. 

7.  Intellectual  Development. 

No  survey  of  the  political  movements  of  this  period 
should  conclude  without  directing  attention  to  something 
more  important,  which  cannot  be  examined  here.     In 
the  years  from    1830  till  some    time    after   the    death 
of  Lincoln,  America  made  those  contributions   to  the 
literature  of  our  common  language  which  though  neither 
her  first  nor  her  last  seem  likely  to  be  most  permanently 
valued.      The  learning  and   literature   of   America   atT 
that  time  centred  round  Boston  and  Harvard  University  I! 
in  the  adjacent  city  of  Cambridge,  and  no  invidiousjji 
comparison  is  intended  or  will  be  felt  if  they,  with  their  v 
poets  and  historians  and  men  of  letters  at  that  time, 


60  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

with  their  peculiar  atmosphere,  instinct  then  and  now 
with  a  life  athletic,  learned,  business-like  and  religious, 
are  taken  to  show  the  dawning  capacities  of  the  new 
nation.  No  places  in  the  United  States  exhibit  more 
visibly  the  kinship  of  America  with  England,  yet  in 
none  certainly  can  a  stranger  see  more  readily  that 
America  is  independent  of  the  Old  World  in  something 
more  than  politics.  Many  of  their  streets  and  buildings 
would  in  England  seem  redolent  of  the  past,  yet  no 
cities  of  the  Eastern  States  played  so  large  a  part  in  the 
development,  material  and  mental,  of  the  raw  and 
vigorous  West.  The  limitations  of  their  greatest  writers 
are  in  a  manner  the  sign  of  their  achievement.  It  would 
have  been  contrary  to  all  human  analogy  if  a  country, 
in  such  an  early  stage  of  creation  out  of  such  a  chaos, 
had  put  forth  books  marked  strongly  as  its  own  and 
yet  as  the  products  of  a  mature  national  mind.  It 
would  also  have  been  surprising  if  since  the  Civil  War 
the  rush  of  still  more  appalling  and  more  complex 
practical  problems  had  not  obstructed  for  a  while  the 
flow  of  imaginative  or  scientific  production.  But  the 
growth  of  those  relatively  early  years  was  great.  Boston 
had  been  the  home  of  a  loveless  Christianity  ;  its  in 
surrection  in  the  War  of  Independence  had  been  soiled 
by  shifty  dealing  and  mere  acidity  ;  but  Boston  from 
the  days  of  Emerson  to  those  of  Phillips  Brooks  radiated 
a  temper  and  a  mental  force  that  was  manly,  tender,  and 
clean.  The  man  among  these  writers  about  whose 
exact  rank,  neither  low  nor  very  high  among  poets, 
there  can  be  least  dispute  was  Longfellow.  He  might 
seem  from  his  favourite  subjects  to  be  hardly  American  ; 
it  was  his  deliberately  chosen  task  to  bring  to  the  new 
country  some  savour  of  things  gentle  and  mellow  caught 
from  the  literature  of  Europe.  But,  in  the  first  place, 
no  writer  could  in  the  detail  of  his  work  have  been 
more  racy  of  that  New  England  countryside  which 
lay  round  his  home  ;  and,  in  the  second  place,  no 
writer  could  have  spoken  more  unerringly  to  the  ear 
of  the  whole  wide  America  of  which  his  home  was  a 
little  part.  It  seems  strange  to  couple  the  name  of  this 


GROWTH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  NATION    61 

mild  and  scholarly  man  with  the  thought  of  that  crude 
Western  world  to  which  we  must  in  a  moment  pass.  But 
the  connection  is  real  and  vital.  It  is  well  shown  in 
the  appreciation  written  of  him  and  his  fellows  by 
the  American  writer  who  most  violently  contrasts  with 
him,  Walt  Whitman. 

A  student  of  American  history  may  feel  something 
like  the  experience  which  is  common  among  travellers 
in  America.  When  they  come  home  they  cannot  tell 
their  friends  what  really  interested  them.  Ugly  things 
and  very  dull  things  are  prominent  in  their  story,  as 
in  the  tales  of  American  humorists.  The  general  im 
pression  they  convey  is  of  something  tiresomely  exten 
sive,  distractingly  miscellaneous,  and  yet  insufferably 
monotonous.  But  that  is  not  what  they  mean.  They 
had  better  not  seek  to  express  themselves  by  too  definite 
instances.  They  will  be  understood  and  believed  when 
they  say  that  to  them  America,  with  its  vast  spaces 
from  ocean  to  ocean,  does  present  itself  as  one  country, 
not  less  worthy  than  any  other  of  the  love  which  it  has 
actually  inspired  ;  a  country  which  is  the  home  of 
distinctive  types  of  manhood  and  womanhood,  bringing 
their  own  addition  to  the  varying  forms  in  which 
kindness  and  courage  and  truth  make  themselves 
admirable  to  mankind.  The  soul  of  a  single  people 
seems  to  be  somewhere  present  in  that  great  mass,  no 
less  than  in  some  tiny  city  State  of  antiquity.  Only 
it  has  to  struggle,  submerged  evermore  by  a  flood  of 
newcomers,  and  defeated  evermore  by  difficulties  quite 
unlike  those  of  other  lands  ;  and  it  struggles  seemingly  / 
with  undaunted  and  with  rational  hope.  / 

^    Americans    are    fond    of    discussing    Americanism. 
Very  often   they  select   as   a   pattern   of  it   Abraham  T 
^Lincoln,  the  man  who  kept  the  North  together  but  has 
been   pronounced   to  Jiave   been   a    Southerner   in   his  I 
inherited  character.NAVhether  he  was  so  typical  or  not, 
it  is  the  central  factNof  this  biography  that  no   man 
ever  pondered  more  deeply,  in  his  own  way,  or  answered 
more  firmly  the  question  whether  there  was  indeed  an 
American  nationality  worth  preserving.  J 


CHAPTER  III 

LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER 

i.  Lije  at  'New  Salem. 

FROM  this  talk  of  large  political  movements  we  have 
to  recall  ourselves  to  a  young  labouring  man  with  hardly 
any  schooling,  naturally  and  incurably  uncouth,  but 
with  a  curious,  quite  modest,  impulse  to  assert  a  kindly 
ascendency  over  the  companions  whom  chance  threw  in 
his  way,  and  with  something  of  the  gift,  which  odd,  shy 
people  often  possess,  for  using  their  very  oddity  as  a 
weapon  in  their  struggles.  In  the  conditions  of  real 
equality  which  still  prevailed  in  a  newly  settled  country 
it  is  not  wonderful  that  he  made  his  way  into  political 
life  when  he  was  twenty-five,  but  it  was  not  till  twenty 
years  later  that  he  played  an  important  part  in  events 
of  enduring  significance. 

Thus  the  many  years  of  public  activity  with  which 
we  are  concerned  in  this  and  the  following  chapter  belong 
rather  to  his  apprenticeship  than  to  his  life's  work  ;  and 
this  apprenticeship  at  first  sight  contrasts  more  strongly 
with  his  fame  afterwards  than  does  his  boyhood  of 
poverty  and  comparatively  romantic  hardship.  For 
many  poor  boys  have  lived  to  make  a  great  mark  on 
history,  but  as  a  rule  they  have  entered  early  on  a  life 
either  of  learning  or  of  adventure  or  of  large  business. 
But  the  affairs  in  which  Lincoln  early  became  immersed 
have  an  air  of  pettiness,  and  from  the  point  of  view  of 
most  educated  men  and  women  in  the  eastern  States  or 
in  Europe,  many  of  the  associates  and  competitors  of 
his  early  manhood,  to  whom  he  had  to  look  up  as  his 
superiors  in  knowledge,  would  certainly  have  seemed 
crude  people  with  a  narrow  horizon.  Indeed,  till  he  was 
called  upon  to  take  supreme  control  of  very  great 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  63 

matters  Lincoln  must  have  had  singularly  little  inter^ 
course  either  with  men  versed  in  great  affairs  or  with  meit 
of  approved  intellectual  distinction.  Bu;t  a  mind  too 
original  to  be  subdued  to  its  surroundings  found  much 
that  was  stimulating  in  this  time  when(  Illinois  was 
beginning  rapidly  to  fill  up.  There  were  plenty  of  men 
with  shrewd  wits  and  robust  character  to  be  met  with, 
and  the  mental  atmosphere  which  surrounded  him  was 
one  of  keen  interest  in  life.  Lincoln  eventually  stands 
out  as  a  surprising  figure  from  among,  the  other  lawyers 
and  little  politicians  of  Illinois,  as  any  great  man  does 
from  any  crowd,  but  some  tribute  16  due  to\the  un 
distinguished  and  historically  uninteresting  me$  whose 
generous  appreciation  gave  rapid  way  to  the  poor,  queer 
youth,  and  ultimately  pushed  him  info  a  greater  arena 
as  their  selected  champion. 

In  1831,  at  the  age  of  twenty- two,  Lincoln,  returning 
from  his  New  Orleans  voyage,  settled  in  New  Salem  to 
await  the  arrival  of  his  patron,  Denton  Offutt,  with  the 
goods  for  a  new  store  in  which  Lincoln  was  to  be  his  assis 
tant.  The  village  itself  was  three  years  old.  It  never 
got  much  beyond  a  population  of  one 'hundred,  and  like 
many  similar  little  towns  of  the  West  it  has  long  since 
perished  off  the  earth.  But  it  was  a  busy  place  for  a 
while,  and,  contrary  to  what  its  name  might  suggest, 
it  aspired  to  be  rather  fast.  It  was  a  cock-fighting  and 
whisky-drinking  society  into  which  Lincoln  was  launched. 
He  managed  to  combine  strict  abstinence  from  liquor 
with  keen  participation  in  all  its  other  diversions.  One 
departure  from  total  abstinence  stands  alleged  among 
the  feats  of  strength  for  which  he  became  noted.  He 
hoisted  a  whisky  barrel,  of  unspecified  but  evidently 
considerable  content,  on  to  his  knees  in  a  squatting 
posture  and  drank  from  the  bunghole.  But  this 
very  arduous  potation  stood  alone.  Offutt  was  some  \ 

time   before   he   arrived  with  his  goods,   and   Lincoln  • 

lived  by  odd  jobs.  At  the  very  beginning  one  Mentor 
Graham,  a  schoolmaster  officiating  in  some  election, 
employed  him  as  a  clerk,  and  the  clerk  seized  the 
occasion  to  make  himself  well  known  to  New  Salem  as 


64  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

a  story-teller.  Then  there  was  a  heavy  job  at  rail- 
splitting,  and  another  job  in  navigating  the  Sangamon 
River.  Offutt's  store  was  at  last  set  up,  and  for  about 
a  year  the  assistant  in  this  important  establishment  had 
valuable  opportunities  of  conversation  with  all  New 
Salem.  He  had  also  leisure  for  study.  He  had  men- 
tioned  to  the  aforesaid  Mentor  Graham  his  "  notion  to 
study  English  grammar,"  and  had  been  introduced  to 
a  work  called  "  Kirkham's  Grammar,"  which  by  a  walk 
of  some  miles  he  could  borrow  from  a  neighbour.  This 
he  would  read,  lying  full  length  on  the  counter  with  his 
head  on  a  parcel  of  calico.  At  other  odd  times  he  would 
work  away  at  arithmetic.  Offutt's  kindly  interest 
procured  him  distinction  in  another  field.  At  Clary's 
Grove,  near  New  Salem,  lived  a  formidable  set  of  young 
ruffians,  over  whose  somewhat  disguised  chivalry  of 
temper  the  staid  historian  of  Lincoln's  youth  becomes 
rapturous.  They  were  given  to  wrecking  the  store  of 
any  New  Salem  tradesman  who  offended  them  ;  so  it 
shows  some  spirit  in  Mr.  Denton  Offutt  that  he  backed 
his  Abraham  Lincoln  to  beat  their  Jack  Armstrong  in  a 
wrestling  match.  He  did  beat  him  ;  moreover,  some 
charm  in  the  way  he  bore  himself  made  him  thenceforth 
not  hated  but  beloved  of  Clary's  Grove  in  general,  and 
the  Armstrongs  in  particular.  Hannah  Armstrong, 
Jack's  wife,  thereafter  mended  and  patched  his  clothes 
for  him,  and,  years  later,  he  had  the  satisfaction,  as 
their  unfeed  advocate,  of  securing  the  acquittal  of  their 
son  from  a  charge  of  murder,  of  which  there  is  some 
reason  to  hope  he  may  not  have  been  guilty.  It  is,  by 
the  way,  a  relief  to  tell  that  there  once  was  a  noted 
wrestling  match  in  which  Lincoln  was  beaten  ;  it  is 
characteristic  of  the  country  that  his  friends  were  sure 
there  was  foul  play,  and  characteristic  of  him  that  he 
indignantly  denied  it. 

Within  a  year  Offutt's  store,  in  the  phrase  of  the  time, 
"  petered    out,"    leaving    Lincoln    shiftless.     But    the 
victor   of   Clary's   Grove,   with  his   added   mastery  of  ; 
"  Kirkham's  Grammar,"  was  now  ripe  for  public  life.  ' 
Moreover,  his  experience  as  a  waterman  gave  him  ideas 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  65 

on  the  question,  which  then  agitated  his  neighbours, 
whether  the  Sangamon  River  could  be  made  navigable. 
He  had  a  scheme  of  his  own  for  doing  this  ;  and  in  the 
spring  of  1832  he  wrote  to  the  local  paper  a  boyish  but 
modest  and  sensible  statement  of  his  views  and  ambi 
tions,  announcing  that  he  would  be  a  candidate  in  the 
autumn  elections  for  the  State  Legislature. 

Meanwhile  he  had  his  one  experience  of  soldiering. 
The  Indian  chief,  Black  Hawk,  who  had  agreed  to  abide 
west  of  the  Mississippi,  broke  the  treaty  and  led  his 
warriors  back  into  their  former  haunts  in  Northern 
Illinois.  The  Governor  of  the  State  called  for  volunteers, 
and  Lincoln  became  one.  He  obtained  the  elective 
rank  of  captain  of  his  company,  and  contrived  to 
maintain  some  sort  of  order  in  that,  doubtless  brave,  but 
undisciplined  body.  He  saw  no  fighting,  but  he  could 
earn  his  living  for  some  months,  and  stored  up  material 
for  effective  chaff  in  Congress  long  afterwards  about  the 
military  glory  which  General  Cass's  supporters  for  the 
Presidency  wished  to  attach  to  their  candidate.  His 
most  glorious  exploit  consisted  in  saving  from  his  own 
men  a  poor  old  friendly  Indian  who  had  fallen  among 
them.  A  letter  of  credentials,  which  the  helpless  creature 
produced,  was  pronounced  a  forgery  and  he  was  about 
to  be  hanged  as  a  spy,  when  Lincoln  appeared  on  the 
scene,  "  swarthy  with  resolution  and  rage,"  and  somehow 
terrified  his  disorderly  company  into  dropping  their 
prey. 

The  war  ended  in  time  for  a  brief  candidature,  and  a 
supporter  of  his  at  the  time  preserved  a  record  of  one 
of  his  speeches.  His  last  important  speech  will  hereafter 
be  given  in  full  for  other  reasons  ;  this  may  be  so  given 
too,  for  it  is  not  a  hundred  words  long :  "  Fellow 
Citizens,  I  presume  you  all  know  who  I  am.  I  am  humble 
Abraham  Lincoln.  I  have  been  solicited  by  many  friends 
to  become  a  candidate  for  the  Legislature.  My  politics 
are  short  and  sweet  like  the  old  woman's  dance.  I  am 
in  favour  of  a  national  bank.  I  am  in  favour  of  the 
internal  improvement  system  and  a  high  protective 
tariff.  These  are  my  sentiments  and  political  principles. 


66  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 


If  elected,  I  shall  be  thankful ;  if  not,  it  will  be  all  the 


same." 


To  this  succinct  declaration  of  policy  may  be  added 
from  his  earlier  letter  that  he  advocated  a  law  against 
usury,  and  laws  for  the  improvement  of  education. 
The  principles  of  the  speech  are  those  which  the  new 
Whig  party  was  upholding  against  the  Democrats 
under  Jackson  (the  President)  and  Van  Buren.  Lincoln's 
neighbours,  like  the  people  of  Illinois  generally,  were 
almost  entirely  on  the  side  of  the  Democrats.  It  is 
interesting  that  however  he  came  by  his  views,  they 
were  early  and  permanently  fixed  on  the  side  then 
unpopular  in  Illinois  ;  and  it  is  interesting  that  though, 
naturally,  not  elected,  he  secured  very  nearly  the  whole 
of  the  votes  of  his  immediate  neighbourhood. 

The  penniless  Lincoln  was  now  hankering  to  become 
a  lawyer,  though  with  some  thoughts  of  the  more 
practicable  career  of  a  blacksmith.  Unexpectedly, 
however,  he  was  tempted  into  his  one  venture,  singularly 
unsuccessful,  in  business.  Two  gentlemen  named  Hern- 
don,  cousins  of  a  biographer  of  Lincoln's,  started  a  store 
in  New  Salem  and  got  tired  of  it.  One  sold  his  share  to 
a  Mr.  Berry,  the  other  sold  his  to  Lincoln.  The  latter 
sale  was  entirely  on  credit — no  money  passed  at  the 
time,  because  there  was  no  money.  The  vendor 
explained  afterwards  that  he  relied  solely  on  Lincoln's 
honesty.  He  had  to  wait  a  long  while  for  full  payment, 
but  what  is  known  of  storekeeping  in  New  Salem  shows 
that  he  did  very  well  for  himself  in  getting  out  of  his 
venture  as  he  did.  Messrs.  Berry  and  Lincoln  next 
acquired,  likewise  for  credit,  the  stock  and  goodwill  of 
two  other  storekeepers,  one  of  them  the  victim  of  a 
raid  from  Clary's  Grove.  The  senior  partner  then 
applied  himself  diligently  to  personal  consumption  of 
the  firm's  liquid  goods ;  the  junior  member  of  the  firm 
was  devoted  in  part  to  intellectual  and  humorous 
converse  with  the  male  customers,  but  a  fatal  shyness 
prevented  him  from  talking  to  the  ladies.  For  the 
rest,  he  walked  long  distances  to  borrow  books,  got 
through  Gibbon  and  through  Rollin's  "  History  of  the 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  67 

World,"  began  his  study  of  Blackstone,  and  acquired  a 
settled  habit  of  reading  novels.  So  business  languished. 
Early  in  1833  Berry  and  Lincoln  sold  out  to  another 
adventurer.  This  also  was  a  credit  transaction.  The 
purchaser  without  avoidable  delay  failed  and  dis 
appeared.  Berry  then  died  of  drink,  leaving  to  Lincoln 
the  sole  responsibility  for  the  debts  of  the  partnership. 
Lincoln  could  with  no  difficulty  and  not  much  reproach 
have  freed  himself  by  bankruptcy.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  he  ultimately  paid  everything,  but  it  took  him 
about  fifteen  years  of  striving  and  pinching  himself. 

Lincoln  is  one  of  the  many  public  characters  to  whom 
the  standing  epithet  "  honest  "  became  attached  ;  in 
his  case  the  claim  to  this  rested  originally  on  the  only 
conclusive  authority,  that  of  his  creditors.  But  there 
is  equally  good  authority,  that  of  his  biographer, 
William  Herndon,  for  many  years  his  partner  as  a 
lawyer,  that  "  he  had  no  money  sense."  This  must 
be  understood  with  the  large  qualification  that  he  meant 
to  pay  his  way  and,  unlike  the  great  statesmen  of  the 
eighteenth  century  in  England,  did  pay  it.  /But,  though 
withjnuch  experience _of  poverty  in  his  earfy~career,l 
never  ^developed  -e-ven-a.  reasonable  desire  to_be__rj 
SVealth  remained  in_  his_~  view  "a  -superfluity ....  of ,  the 
things  one  does  not  want.3  He  was  always  interested 
in  mathematics,  but  mainly  as  a  discipline  in  thinking, 
and  partly,  perhaps,  in  association  with  mechanical 
problems  of  which  he  was  fond  enough  to  have  once  in 
his  life  patented  an  invention}  The  interest  never  led 
him  to  take  to  accounts  or  to  long-sighted  financial 
provisions.  In  later  days,  when  he  received  a  payment 
for  his  fees,  his  partner's  share  would  be  paid  then  and 
there  ;  then  perhaps  the  rent  would  be  paid ;  and  the 
balance  would  be  spent  at  once  in  groceries  and  other 
goods  likely  to  be  soon  wanted,  including  at  long 
intervals,  when  the  need  was  very  urgent,  a  new  hat. 

These  are  amiable  personal  traits,  but  they  mark  the 
limitations  of  his  capacity  as  a  statesman.  The  chief 
questions  which  agitated  the  Illinois  Legislature  were 
economic,  and  so  at  first  were  the  issues  between  Whigs 


68  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

and  Democrats  in  Federal  policy.  /Lincoln,  though  he 
threw  himself  into  these  affairs  witF  youthful  fervour, 
would  appear  never  to  have  had  much  grasp  of  such 
matters.  "  In  this  respect  alone,"  writes  an  admirer, 
"  I  have  always  considered  Mr.  Lincoln  a  weak  man." 
It  is  only  when  (rarely,  at  first)  constitutional  or  moral 
issues  emerge  that  his  politics  become  interesting!}  We 
can  guess  the  causes  which  attached  him  to  thewhigs. 
As  the  party  out  of  power,  and  in  Illinois  quite  out  of 
favour,  they  had  doubtless  some  advantage  in  character. 
As  we  have  seen,  the  greatest  minds  among  American 
statesmen  of  that  day,  Webster  and  Clay,  were  Whigs. 
Lincoln's  simple  and  quite  reasonable,  if  inconclusive, 
argument  for  Protection,  can  be  found  among  his 
speeches  of  some  years  later.  And  schemes  of  internal 
development  certainly  fired  his  imagination. 

After  his  failure  in  business  Lincoln  subsisted  for  a 
while  on  odd  jobs  for  farmers,  but  was  soon  employed 
as  assistant  surveyor  by  John  Calhoun,  then  surveyor 
of  the  county.  This  gentleman,  who  had  been  educated 
as  a  lawyer  but  "  taught  school  in  preference,"  was  a 
keen  Democrat,  and  had  to  assure  Lincoln  that  office  as 
his  assistant  would  not  necessitate  his  desertion  of  his 
principles.  He  was  a  clever  man,  and  Lincoln  remem 
bered  him  long  after  as  the  most  formidable  antagonist 
he  ever  met  in  debate.  With  the  help,  again,  of  Mentor 
Graham,  Lincoln  soon  learned  the  surveyor's  business. 
He  continued  at  this  work  till  he  was  able  to  start  as  a 
lawyer,  and  there  is  evidence  that  his  surveys  of  property 
were  done  with  extreme  accuracy.  (  Soon  he  further 
obtained  the  local  Postmastership?)  This,  the  only 
position  except  the  Presidency  itself  which  he  ever 
held  in  the  Federal  Government,  was  not  onerous,  for 
the  mails  were  infrequent ;  he  "  carried  the  office 
around  in  his  hat  "  ;  we  are  glad  to  be  told  that  "  his 
administration  gave  satisfaction."  Once  calamity 
threatened  him  ;  a  creditor  distrained  on  the  horse  and 
the  instruments  necessary  to  his  surveyorship  ;  but 
Lincoln  was  reputed  to  be  a  helpful  fellow,  and  friends 
were  ready  to  help  him  ;  they  bought  the  horse  and 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  69 

instruments  back  for  him.     To  this  time  belongs  his 
first    acquaintance    with    some    writers    of    unsettling 
tendency,  Tom  Paine,  Voltaire,  and  Volney,  who  was 
then  recognised  as  one  of  the  dangerous  authors.     Cock 
fights,  strange  feats  of  strength,  or  of  usefulness  with 
axe   or  hammer  or  scythe,  and  a  passion  for  mimicry 
continue.     In    1834    he    became    a    candidate    again.  I 
"  Can't  the  party  raise  any  better  material  than  that  ?  " 
asked  a  bystander  before  a  speech  of  his  ;    after  it,  he 
exclaimed  that  the   speaker  knew  more  than  all  the 
other    candidates    put    together.  (This    time    he    wasj 
elected,  being  then  twenty-five,  and  thereafter  he  was! 
returned  for  three  further  terms  of  two  years.     Shortly  \ 
before  his  second  election  in  1836  the  State  capital  was  t 
removed  to  Springfield,  in  his  own  county.     There  in  I 
1837  Lincoln  fixed  his  home.^  He  had  long  been  reading  j 
law  in  his  curious,   spasmodically  concentrated  way, 
and  he  had  practised  a  little  as  a  "  pettifogger,"  that  is, 
an  unlicensed  practitioner  in  the  inferior  courts.     He 
had  now  obtained  his  licence  and  was  very  shortly  taken 
into  partnership  by  an  old  friend  in  Springfield. 

2.  In  the  Illinois  Legislature. 

Here  his  youth  may  be  said  to  end.  Springfield  was 
a  different  place  from  New  Salem.  There  were  carriages 
in  it,  and  ladies  who  studied  poetry  and  the  fashions. 
There  were  families  from  Virginia  and  Kentucky  who 
were  conscious  of  ancestry,  while  graver,  possibly  more 
pushing,  people  from  the  north-eastern  States,  soon 
to  outnumber  them,  were  a  little  inclined  to  ridicule 
what  they  called  their  "  illusory  ascendency."  There 
was  a  brisk  competition  of  Churches,  and  mutual  im 
provement  societies  such  as  the  "  Young  Men's  Lyceum  " 
had  a  rival  claim  to  attention  with  races  and  cock-fights. 

And  it  was  an  altered  Abraham  Lincoln  that  came  to 
inhabit  Springfield.  Arriving  a  day  or  two  before  his 
first  law  partnership  was  settled  he  came  into  the  shop 
of  a  thriving  young  tradesman,  Mr.  Joshua  Speed,  to 
ask  about  the  price  of  the  cheapest  bedding  and  other 
necessary  articles.  The  sum  for  which  Lincoln,  who 


7o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

had  not  one  cent,  would  have  had  to  ask,  and  would 
have  been  readily  allowed,  credit,  was  only  seventeen 
dollars.  But  this  huge  prospect  of  debt  so  visibly 
depressed  him  that  Speed  instantly  proposed  an  arrange 
ment  which  involved  no  money  debt.  He  took  him 
upstairs  and  installed  him — Western  domestic  arrange 
ments  were  and  are  still  simple — as  the  joint  occupant 
of  his  own  large  bed.  "  Well,  Speed,  I'm  moved,"  was 
the  terse  acknowledgment.  Speed  was  to  move  him 
later  by  more  precious  charity.  We  are^concerned  for 
the  moment  with  what  moved  Speed.  £~I  looked  up  at 
him,"  said  he,  long  after,  "  and  I  thought  then,  as  I 
think  now,  that  I  never  saw  so  gloomy  and  melancholy 
a  face  in  my  h'fe?l  The  struggle  of  ambition  and 
poverty  may  welUKave  been  telling  on  Lincoln  ;  but 
besides  that  a  tragical  love  story  (shortly  to  be  told) 
had  left  a  deep  and  permanent  mark  ;  but  these  in 
fluences  worked,  we  may  suppose,  upon  a  disposition 
quite  as  prone  to  sadness  as  to  mirth.  His  exceedingly 
gregarious  habit,  drawing  him  to  almost  any  assembly 
of  his  own  sex,  continued  all  his  life  ;  but  it  alternated 
from  the  first  with  a  habit  of  solitude  or  abstraction, 
the  abstraction  of  a  man  who,  when  he  does  wish  to  read, 
will  read  intently  in  the  midst  of  crowd  or  noise,  or 
walking  along  the  street.  He  was  what  might  unkindly 
be  called  almost  a  professional  humorist,  the  master 
of  a  thousand  startling  stories,  delightful  to  the  hearer, 
but  possibly  tiresome  in  written  reminiscences,  but  we 
know  too  well  that  gifts  of  this  kind  are  as  compatible 
with  sadness  as  they  certainly  are  with  deadly  serious 
ness. 

The  Legislature  of  Illinois  in  the  eight  years  from 
1834  to  1842,  in  which  Lincoln  belonged  to  it,  was, 
though  not  a  wise,  a  vigorous  body.  In  the  conditions 
which  then  existed  it  was  not  likely  to  have  been 
captured  as  the  Legislature  of  wilder  and  more  thinly- 
peopled  States  have  sometimes  been  by  a  disreputable 
element  in  the  community,  nor  to  have  subsided  into 
the  hands  of  the  dull  mechanical  class  of  professional 
politicians  with  which,  rightly  or  wrongly,  we  have  now 


LINCOLN'S   EARLY  CAREER  71 

been  led  to  associate  American  State  Government. 
The  fact  of  Lincoln's  own  election  suggests  that  dishonest 
adventurers  might  easily  have  got  there,  but  equally 
suggests  that  a  very  different  type  of  men  prevailed. 
"  The  Legislature,"  we  are  told,  "  contained  the  youth 
and  blood  and  fire  of  the  frontier."  Among  the  Democrats 
in  the  Legislature  was  Stephen  Douglas,  who  was  to 
become  one  of  the  most  powerful  men  in  the  United 
States  while  Lincoln  was  still  unknown  ;  and  several  of 
Lincoln's  Whig  colleagues  were  afterwards  to  play 
distinguished  or  honourable  parts  in  politics  or  war. 
We  need  not  linger  over  them,  but  what  we  know  of 
those  with  whom  he  had  any  special  intimacy,  makes  it 
entirely  pleasant  to  associate  him  with  them.  After 
a  short  time  in  which,  like  any  sensible  young  member 
of  an  assembly,  he  watched  and  hardly  ever  spoke, 
/Lincoln  soon  made  his  way  among  these  men,  and  in 
"^1838  and  1840  the  Whig  members — though,  being  in  a 
minority,  they  could  not  elect  him — gave  him  their 
unanimous  votes  for  the  Speakership  of  the  Assembly. 
The  business  which  engrossed  the  Legislature,  at  least 
up  to  1838,  was  the  development  of  the  natural  resources 
of  the  State.  These  were  great. \  It  was  natural  that 
railways,  canals  and  other  public  works  to  develop 
them  should  be  pushed  forward  at  the  public  cost. 
Other  new  countries  since,  with  less  excuse  because  with 
greater  warning  from  experience,  have  plunged  in  this 
matter,  and,  though  the  Governor  protested,  the  Illinois 
Legislature,  Whigs  and  Democrats,  Lincoln  and  every 
one  else,  plunged  gaily,  so  that,  during  the  collapse  which 
followed,  Illinois,  though,  like  Lincoln  himself,  it  paid 
its  debts  in  the  end,  was  driven  in  1840  to  suspend 
interest  payments  for  several  years. 

Very  little  is  recorded  of  Lincoln's  legislative  doings.  | 
What  is  related  chiefly  exhibits  his  delight  in  the  game 
of  negotiation  and  combination  by  which  he  and  the 
other  members  for  his  county,  together  known  as  "  the 
Long  Nine,"  advanced  the  particular  projects  which 
pleased  their  constituents  or  struck  their  own  fancy. 
Thus  he  early  had  a  hand  in  the  removal  of  the  capital 


72  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

from  Vandalia  to  Springfield  in  his  own  county.  The 
map  of  Illinois  suggests  that  Springfield  was  a  better 
site  for  the  purpose  than  Vandalia  and  at  least  as  good 
as  Jacksonville  or  Peoria  or  any  of  its  other  competitors. 
Of  his  few  recorded  speeches  one  concerns  a  proposed 
inquiry  into  some  alleged  impropriety  in  the  allotment 
of  shares  in  the  State  Bank.  It  is  certainly  the  speech 
of  a  bold  man  ;  it  argues  with  remarkable  directness  that 
whereas  a  committee  of  prominent  citizens  which  had 
already  inquired  into  this  matter  consisted  of  men  of 
known  honesty,  the  proposed  committee  of  the  Legis 
lators,  whom  he  was  addressing,  would  consist  of  men 
who,  for  all  he  knew,  might  be  honest,  and,  for  all  he 
knew,  might  not. 

The  Federal  politics  of  this  time,  though  Lincoln 
played  an  active  local  part  in  the  campaigns  of  the 
Whig  party,  concern  us  little.  The  Whigs,  to  whom  he 
did  subordinate  service,  were,  as  has  been  said,  an 
unlucky  party.  In  1840,  in  the  reaction  which  extreme 
commercial  depression  created  against  the  previously 
omnipotent  Democrats,  the  Whig  candidate  for  the 
Presidency  was  successful.  This  was  General  Harrison, 
a  respected  soldier  of  the  last  war,  who  was  glorified  as 
a  sort  of  Cincinnatus  and  elected  after  an  outburst  of 
enthusiastic  tomfoolery  such  as  never  before  or  since 
rejoiced  the  American  people.  But  President  Harrison 
had  hardly  been  in  office  a  month  when  he  died. 
Some  say  he  was  worried  to  death  by  office  seekers,  but 
a  more  prosaic  cause,  pneumonia,  can  also  be  alleged. 
It  is  satisfactory  that  this  good  man's  son  worthily 
filled  his  office  forty-eight  years  after,  but  his  immediate 
successor  was  of  course  the  Vice- President,  Tyler,  chosen 
as  an  influential  opponent  of  the  last  Democrat  Presi 
dents,  but  not  because  he  agreed  with  the  Whigs. 
Cultivated  but  narrow-minded,  highly  independent  and 
wholly  perverse,  he  satisfied  no  aspiration  of  the  Whigs 
and  paved  the  way  effectually  for  the  Democrat  who 
succeeded  him. 

Throughout  these  years  Lincoln  was  of  course  working 
at  law,  which  became,  with  the  development  of  the 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  73 

country,  a  more  arduous  and  a  more  learned  profession. 
Sessions  of  the  Legislature  did  not  last  long,  and  political 
canvasses  were  only  occasional.  If  Lincoln  was  active 
in  these  matters  he  was  in  many  other  directions,  too, 
a  keen  participator  in  the  keen  life  of  the  society  round 
him.  Nevertheless  politics  as  such,  and  apart  from  any 
large  purpose  to  be  achieved  through  them,  had  for 
many  years  a  special  fascination  for  him.  Foj^Qne 
thing  he  was  argumentative  in  the  best  sense,  with  a 
passion  for  what  the  Greeks  sometimes  called  "dialectic"; 
his  rare  capacity  for  solitary  thought,  the  most  marked 
and  the  greatest  of  his  powers,  went  absolutely  hand  in 
hand  with  the  desire  to  reduce  his  thoughts  to  a  form 
which  would  carry  logical  conviction  to  others.  Further, 
there  can  be  no  doubt — and  such  a  combination  of 
tastes,  though  it  seems  to  be  uncommon,  is  quite  in 
telligible — that  the  somewhat  unholy  business  of  party 
management  was  at  first  attractive  to  him.  To  the 
end  he  showed  no  intuitive  comprehension  of  individual  "• 
men.  His  sincere  friendly  intention,  the  unanswerable 
force  of  an  argument,  the  convincing  analogy  veiled  in 
an  unseemly  story,  must  take  their  chance  of  suiting 
the  particular  taste  of  Senator  Sherman  or  General 
McClellan  ;  but  any  question  of  managing  men  in  the 
mass — will  a  given  candidate's  influence  with  this 
section  of  people  count  for  more  than  his  unpopularity 
with  that  section  ?  and  so  on — involved  an  element  of 
subtle  and  long-sighted  calculation  which  was  vastly 
congenial  to  him.  We  are  to  see  him  hereafter  applying  \ 
this  sort  of  science  on  a  grand  scale  and  for  a  great  end. 
His  early  discipline  in  it  is  a  dull  subject,  interesting 
only  where  it  displays,  as  it  sometimes  does,  the  perfect 
fairness  with  which  this  ambitious  man  could  treat  his 
own  claims  as  against  those  of  a  colleague  and  com 
petitor. 

In  forming  any  judgment  of  Lincoln's  career  it  must, 
further,  be  realised  that,  while  he  was  growing  up  as  a 
statesman,  the  prevailing  conception  of  popular  govern 
ment  was  all  the  time  becoming  more  unfavourable  to 
leadership  and  to  robust  individuality.  The  new  party 


74  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

machinery  adopted  by  the  Democrats  under  Jackson, 

as   the   proper  mode   of  securing  government   by  the 

people,  induced  a  deadly  uniformity  of  utterance  ;  breach 

of  that  uniformity  was  not  only  rash,  but   improper. 

Once  in  early  days  it  was  demanded  in  a  newspaper  that 

"  all  candidates  should  show  their  hands."     "  Agreed," 

writes  Lincoln,   "  here's   mine  "  ;    and  then  follows  a 

young  man's  avowal  of  advanced  opinions  ;    he  would 

give  the  suffrage  to  "  all  whites  who  pay  taxes  or  bear 

arms,  by  no  means  excluding  females."     Disraeli,  who 

was    Lincoln's   contemporary,   throve    by  exuberances 

quite  as  startling  as  this,  nor  has  any  English  politician 

found  it  damaging  to  be  bold.     On  this  occasion  indeed 

(in  1836)  Lincoln  was  far  from  damaging  himself  ;   the 

Whigs  had  not  till  a  few  years  later  been  induced,  for 

self-preservation,    to    copy    the    Democratic    machine. 

But  it  is  striking  that  the  admiring  friend  who  reports 

this  declaration,  "  too  audacious  and  emphatic  for  the 

statesmen  of  a  later  day,"  must  carefully  explain  how 

it  could  possibly  suit  the  temper  of  a  time  which  in  a 

few  years  passed  away.     Very  soon  the  question  whether 

a  proposal  or  even  a  sentiment  was  timely  or  premature 

came  to  bulk  too  large  in  the  deliberations  of  Lincoln's 

friends.     The  reader  will  perhaps  wonder  later  whether 

such  considerations  did  not  bulk  too  largely  in  Lincoln's 

own  mind.     Was  there  in  his  statesmanship,  even  in 

later  days  when  he  had  great  work  to  do,  an  element 

iof  that  opportunism  which,  if  not  actually  base,  is  at 

/least  cheap  ?     Or  did  he  come  as  near  as  a  man  with 

I  many  human  weaknesses  could  come  to  the  wise  and 

nobly  calculated  opportunism  which  is  not  merely  the 

most  beneficent  statesmanship,  but  demands  a  heroic 

self-mastery  ? 

The  main  interest  of  his  doings  in  Illinois  politics  and 
in  Congress  is  the  help  they  may  give  in  penetrating 
his  later  mind.  [Pn  the  one  hand  it  is  certain  that 
Lincoln  trained  himself  to  be  a  great  student  of  the 
fitting  opportunity.  He  evidently  paid  very  serious 
attention  to  the  counsels  of  friends  who  would  check 
his  rasher  impulses.  One  of  his  closest  associates 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  75 

insists  that  his  impulsive  judgment  was  bad,  and  he 
probably  thought  so  himself.  It  will  be  seen  later 
that  the  most  momentous  utterance  he  ever  made  was 
kept  back  through  the  whole  space  of  two  years  of 
crisis  at  the  instance  of  timid  friends.  It  required  not 
less  courage  and  was  certainly  more  effective  when  at 
last  it  did  come  out.  The  same  great  capacity  for 
waiting  marks  any  steps  that  he  took  for  his  own 
advancement.  Indeed  it  was  a  happy  thing  for  him  and 
for  his  country  that  his  character  and  the  whole  cast 
of  his  ideas  and  sympathies  were  of  a  kind  to  which  the 
restraint  imposed  on  an  American  politician  was  most 
congenial  and  to  which  therefore  it  could  do  least  harrnTj 
He  was  to  prove  himself  a  patient  man  in  other  ways  -£s 
well  as  this.  On  many  things,  perhaps  on  most,  the 
thoughts  he  worked  out  in  his  own  mind  diverged  very 
widely  from  those  of  his  neighbours,  but  he  was  not  in 
the  least  anxious  either  to  conceal  or  to  obtrude  them. 
Js  social  philosophy  as  he  expressed  it  to  his  friends 
in  these  days  was  one  which  contemplated  great  future 
reforms — abolition  of  slavery  and  a  strict  temperance 
policy  were  among  them.  But  he  looked  for  them  with 
a  sort  of  fatalistic  confidence  in  the  ultimate  victory  of 
reason,  and  saw  no  use  and  a  good  deal  of  harm  in 
premature  political  agitation  for  them.  "  All  such 
questions,"  he  is  reported  to  have  said,  "  must  find 
lodgment  with  the  most  enlightened  souls  who  stamp 
them  with  their  approval.  In  God's  own  time  they  will 
be  organised  into  law  and  thus  woven  into  the  fabric  of 
our  institutions."*TThis  seems  a  little  cold-blooded,  but 
perhaps  we  can  already  begin  to  recognise  the  man  who, 
when  the  time  had  fully  come,  would  be  on  the  right 
side,  and  in  whom  the  evil  which  he  had  deeply  but 
restrainedly  hated  would  find  an  appallingly  wary  foe. 
But  there  were  crucial  instances  which  test  sufficiently 
whether  this  wary  politician  was  a  true  man  or  not. 
The  soil  of  Illinois  was  free  soil  by  the  Ordinance  of 
1 787,  and  Congress  would  only  admit  it  to  the  Union  as 
a  free  State.  But  it  had  been  largely  peopled  from  the 
South.  There  had  been  much  agitation  against  this 


76  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

restriction  ;  prevailing  sentiment  to  a  late  date  strongly 
approved  of  slavery  ;  it  was  at  Alton  in  Illinois  that,  in 
1836,  Elijah  Lovejoy,  an  Abolitionist  publisher,  had 
been  martyred  by  the  mob  which  had  failed  to  in 
timidate  him.  In  1837,  when  the  bold  agitation  of  the 
Abolitionists  was  exciting  much  disapproval,  the  Illinois 
Legislature  passed  resolutions  condemning  that  agitation 
and  declaring  in  soothing  tones  the  constitutional 
powerlessness  of  Congress  to  interfere  with  slavery  in 
the  Southern  States.  Now  Lincoln  himself — whether 
for  good  reasons  or  bad  must  be  considered  later — 
thoroughly  disapproved  of  the  actual  agitation  of  the 
Abolitionists ;  and  the  resolutions  in  question,  but  for 
one  merely  theoretical  point  of  law  and  for  an  unctuous 

/  misuse  of  the  adjective  "  sacred,"  contained  nothing 
which  he  could  not  literally  have  accepted.  The 
objection  to  them  lay  in  the  motive  which  made  it 

I    worth  while  to  pass  them.     Lincoln  drew  up  and  placed 

i  on  the  records  of  the  House  a  protest  against  these 
resolutions.  He  defines  in  it  his  own  quite  conservative 

/  opinions  ;  he  deprecates  the  promulgation  of  Abolition 
doctrines  ;  but  he  does  so  because  it  "  tends  rather  to 
increase  than  abate  the  evils  "  of  slavery  ;  and  he  lays 
down  "  that  the  institution  of  slavery  is  founded  on 
both  injustice  and  bad  policy."  One  man  alone  could 

\  he  induce  to  sign  this  protest  with  him,  and  that  man 
was  not  seeking  re-election. 

"By  1842  Lincoln  had  grown  sensibly  older,  and  a  little 
less  ready,  we  may  take  it,  to  provoke  unnecessary 
antagonism.  Probably  very  old  members  of  Free 
Churches  are  the  people  best  able  to  appreciate  the 
daring  of  the  following  utterance.  Speaking  on 
Washington's  birthday  in  a  Presbyterian  church  to  a 
temperance  society  formed  among  the  rougher  people 
of  the  town  and  including  former  drunkards  who 
desired  to  reform  themselves,  he  broke  out  in  protest 
against  the  doctrine  that  respectable  persons  should 
shun  the  company  of  people  tempted  to  intemperance. 
"  If,"  he  said,  "  they  believe  as  they  profess  that 
Omnipotence  condescended  to  take  upon  Himself  the 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  77 

form  of  sinful  man,  and  as  such  die  an  ignominious 
death,  surely  they  will  not  refuse  submission  to  the 
infinitely  lesser  condescension,  for  the  temporal  and 
perhaps  eternal  salvation  of  a  large,  erring,  and  un 
fortunate  class  of  their  fellow-creatures !  Nor  is  the 
condescension  very  great.  In  my  judgment  such  of  us 
as  have  never  fallen  victims  have  been  spared  more 
from  the  absence  of  appetite  than  from  any  mental 
or  moral  superiority  over  those  who  have.  Indeed,  I 
believe,  if  we  take  habitual  drunkards  as  a  class,  that 
their  heads  and  their  hearts  will  bear  an  advantageous 
comparison  with  those  of  any  other  class."  It  proved, 
at  a  later  day,  very  lucky  for  America  that  the  virtuous 
Lincoln,  who  did  not  drink  strong  drink — nor,  <it^4& 
-sad  to  say,  smoke,  nor,  which  is  all  to  the  good,  chew — 
did  feel  like  that  about  drunkenness.  But  there  was 
great  and  loud  wrath.  "  It's  a  shame,"  said  one,  "  that 
he  should  be  permitted  to  abuse  us  so  in  the  house  of 
the  Lord."  It  is  certain  that  in  this  sort  of  way  he  did 
himself  a  good  deal  of  injury  as  an  aspiring  politician. 
It  is  also  the  fact  that  he  continued  none  the  less  per 
sistently  in  a  missionary  work  conceived  in  a  spirit 
none  the  less  Christian  because  it  shocked  many  pious 
people. 

3.  Marriage. 

The  private  life  of  Lincoln  continued,  and  for  many 
years  increasingly,  to  be  equally  marked  by  indis 
criminate  sociability  and  brooding  loneliness.  Comfort 
and  the  various  influences  which  may  be  associated 
with  the  old-fashioned  American  word  "  elegance  " 
seem  never  to  enter  into  it.  What  is  more,  little  can 
be  discerned  of  positive  happiness  in  the  background  of 
his  life,  as  the  freakish  elasticity  of  his  youth  disappeared 
and,  after  a  certain  measure  of  marked  success,  the 
further  objects  of  his  ambition  though  not  dropped 
became  unlikely  of  attainment  and  seemed,  we  may 
guess,  of  doubtful  value.  All  along  he  was  being  moulded 
for  endurance  rather  than  for  enjoyment. 

Nor,  though  his  children  evidently  brought  him  happi- 


78  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

ness,  does  what  we  know  of  his  domesticities  and  dearest 
affections  weaken  this  general  impression.  When  he 
married  he  had  gone  through  a  saddening  experience.  He 
started  on  manhood  with  a  sound  and  chivalrous  outlook 
on  women  in  general,  and  a  nervous  terror  of  actual  women 
when  he  met  them.  In  New  Salem  days  he  absented 
himself  from  meals  for  the  whole  time  that  some  ladies 
were  staying  at  his  boarding-house.  His  clothes  and  his 
lack  of  upbringing  must  have  weighed  with  him,  besides 
his  natural  disposition.  None  the  less,  of  course  he  fell  in 
love,  f  Miss  Ann  Rutledge,  the  daughter  of  a  store  and 
tavern  keeper  from  Kentucky  with  whom  Lincoln  was 
boarding  in  1833,  has  been  described  as  of  exquisite 
beauty  ;  some  say  this  is  overstated,  but  speak  strongly 
of  her  grace  and  charm.  A  lady  who  knew  her  gives 
these  curiously  collocated  particulars  :  "  Miss  Rutledge 
had  auburn  hair,  blue  eyes,  fair  complexion.  She  was 
pretty,  slightly  slender,  but  in  everything  a  good-hearted 
young  woman.  She  was  about  five  feet  two  inches 
high,  and  weighed  in  the  neighbourhood  of  a  hundred 
and  twenty  pounds.  She  was  beloved  by  all  who  knew 
her.  She  died  as  it  were  of  grief.  In  speaking  of  her 
death  and  her  grave  Lincoln  once  said  to  me,  '  My  heart 
lies  buried  there.' 3  The  poor  girl,  when  Lincoln  first 
came  courting  to  her,  had  passed  through  a  grievous 
agitation.  She  had  been  engaged  to  a  young  man, 
who  suddenly  returned  to  his  home  in  the  Eastern  States, 
after  revealing  to  her,  with  some  explanation  which  was 
more  convincing  to  her  than  to  her  friends,  that  he  had 
been  passing  under  an  assumed  name.  It  seems  that 
his  absence  was  strangely  prolonged,  that  for  a  long 
time  she  did  not  hear  from  him,  that  his  letters  when 
they  did  come  puzzled  her,  that  she  clung  to  him  long, 
but  yielded  at  last  to  her  friends,  who  urged  their  very 
natural  suspicions  upon  her.  It  is  further  suggested 
that  there  was  some  good  explanation  of  his  conduct 
all  the  while,  and  that  she  learnt  this  too  late  when 
actually  engaged  to  Lincoln.  However  that  may  be, 
shortly  after  her  engagement  to  Lincoln  she  fell  seriously 
ill,  insisted,  as  she  lay  ill,  on  a  long  interview  with 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  79 

Lincoln  alone,  and  a  day  or  two  later  died.  This  was  \ 
in  1835,  when  he  was  twenty-six.  It  is  perhaps  right 
to  say  that  one  biographer  throws  doubt  on  the  sig 
nificance  of  this  story  in  Lincoln's  life.  The  details  as 
to  Ann  Rutledge's  earlier  lover  are  vague  and  uncertain. 
The  main  facts  of  Lincoln's  first  engagement  and  almost 
immediate  loss  of  his  betrothed  are  quite  certain  ;  the 
blow  would  have  been  staggering  enough  to  any 
ordinary  young  lover  ;  and  we  know  nothing  of  Lincoln! 
which  would  discredit  Mr.  Herndon's  judgment  thatr 
its  effect  on  him  was  both  acute  and  permanent.  There! 
can  be  no  real  doubt  that  his  spells  of  melancholy  were 
ever  afterwards  more  intense,  and  politer  biographers 
should  not  have  suppressed  the  testimony  that  for  a 
time  that  melancholy  seemed  tc  his  friends  to  verge 
upon  insanity.  He  always  found  good  friends,  and,  as 
was  to  happen  again  later,  one  of  them,  Mr.  Bowline 
Greene,  carried  him  off  to  his  own  secluded  home  and 
watched  him  carefully.  He  said  "  the  thought  that  the 
snows  and  rains  fell  upon  her  grave  filled  him  with 
indescribable  grief."  Two  years  later  he  told  a  fellow- 
legislator  that  "  although  he  seemed  to  others  to  enjoy 
life  rapturously,  yet  when  alone  he  was  so  overcome 
by  mental  depression,  he  never  dared  to  carry  a  pocket- 
knife."  Later  still  Greene,  who  had  helped  him,  died, 
and  Lincoln  was  to  speak  over  his  grave.  For  once  in 
his  life  he  broke  down  entirely  ;  "  the  tears  ran  down 
his  yellow  and  shrivelled  cheeks.  .  .  .  After  repeated 
efforts  he  found  it  impossible  to  speak  and  strode  away 
sobbing." 

The  man  whom  a  grief  of  this  kind  has  affected  not 
only  intensely,  but  morbidly,  is  almost  sure,  before  its 
influence  has  faded,  to  make  love  again,  and  is  very 
likely  to  do  so  foolishly.    (Miss  Mary  Owens  was  slightly  \ 
older   than   Lincoln.     She   was   a   handsome   woman  ;  I 
commanding,  but  comfortable.     In  the  tales  of  Lincoln's 
love  stories,  much  else  is  doubtfully  related,  but  the 
lady's  weight  is  in  each  case  stated  with  assurance,  and 
when  she  visited  her  sister  in  New  Salem  in  1836  Mary 
Owens  weighed  one  hundred  and  fifty  pounds.     There 


8o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

is  nothing  sad  in  her  story  ;  she  was  before  long  happily 
married — not  to  Lincoln — and  she  long  outlived  him. 
But  Lincoln,  who  had  seen  her  on  a  previous  visit  and 
partly  remembered  her,  had  been  asked,  perhaps  in 
jest,  by  her  sister  to  marry  her  if  she  returned,  and  had 
rashly  announced  half  in  jest  that  he  would.  Her  sister 
promptly  fetched  her,  and  he  lingered  for  some  time  in 
a  half-engaged  condition,  writing  her  reasonable,  con 
scientious,  feeble  letters,  in  which  he  put  before  her 
dispassionately  the  question  whether  she  could  patiently 
bear  "  to  see  without  sharing  ...  a  lot  of  flourishing 
about  in  carriages,  ...  to  be  poor  without  the  means 
of  hiding  your  poverty,"  and  assuring  her  that  "  I 
should  be  much  happier  with  you  than  the  way  I  am, 
provided  I  saw  no  signs  of  discontent  in  you."  Whether 
he  rather  wished  to  marry  her  but  felt  bound  to  hold 
her  free,  or  distinctly  wished  not  to  marry  her  but  felt 
bound  not  to  hold  himself  free,  he  probably  was  never 
sure.  The  lady  very  wisely  decided  that  he  could  not 
make  her  happy,  and  returned  to  Kentucky.  She  said 
he  was  deficient  in  the  little  courteous  attentions  which 
a  woman's  happiness  requires  of  her  husband.  She 
gave  instances  long  after  to  prove  her  point ;  but  she 
always  spoke  .of  him  with  friendship  and  respect  as 
"  a  man  with  a  heart  full  of  human  kindness  and  a 
head  full  of  common  sense." 

Rather  unluckily,  Lincoln,  upon  his  rejection  orl 
release,  relieved  his  feelings  in  a  letter  about  Miss  Owens  I 
to  one  of  the  somewhat  older  married  ladies  who  were 
kind  to  him,  the  wife  of  one  of  his  colleagues.  She 
ought  to  have  burnt  his  letter,  but  she  preserved  it  to 
kindle  mild  gossip  after  his  death.  It  is  a  burlesque 
account  of  his  whole  adventure,  describing,  with  touches 
of  very  bad  taste,  his  disillusionment  with  the  now 
maturer  charms  of  Miss  Owens  when  her  sister  brought 
her  back  to  New  Salem,  and  making  comedy  of  his  own 
honest  bewilderment  and  his  mingled  relief  and  mortifi 
cation  when  she  at  last  refused  him.  We  may  take  it 
as  evidence  of  the  natural  want  of  perception  and  right 
instinctive  judgment  in  minor  matters  which  some 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  81 

who  knew  and  loved  him  attribute  to  him.  But, 
besides  that,  the  man  who  found  relief  in  this  ill- 
conceived  exercise  of  humour  was  one  in  whom  the 
prospect  of  marriage  caused  some  strange  and  pitiful 
perturbation  of  mind. 

yThis  was  in  1838,  and  a  year  later  Mary  Todd  came 
from  Kentucky  to  stay  at  Springfield  with  her  brother- 
in-law  Ninian  Edwards,  a  legislator  of  Illinois  and  a 
close  ally  of  Lincoln's.  She  was  aged  twenty-one,  and 
her  weight  was  one  hundred  and  thirty  pounds.  She  was 
well  educated,  and  had  family  connections  which  were 
highly  esteemed.  She  was  pleasant  in  company,  but 
somewhat  imperious,  and  she  was  a  vivacious  talker. 
When  among  the  young  men  who  now  became  attentive 
in  calling  on  the  Edwards's  Lincoln  came  and  sat 
awkwardly  gazing  on  Miss  Todd,  Mrs.  Edwards  appears 
to  have  remarked  that  the  two  were  not  suited  to  each 
other.  But  an  engagement  took  place  all  the  same. 
As  to  the  details  of  what  followed,  whether  he  or  she 
was  the  first  to  have  doubts,  and  whether,  as  some  say, 
the  great  Stephen  Douglas  appeared  on  the  scene  as  a 
rival  and  withdrew  rather  generously  but  too  late,  is 
uncertain.  But  Lincoln  composed  a  letter  to  break 
off  his  engagement.  He  showed  it  to  Joshua  Speed, 
who  told  him  that  if  he  had  the  courage  of  a  man  he 
would  not  write  to  her,  but  see  her  and  speak.  He  did 
so.  She  cried.  He  kissed  and  tried  to  comfort  her. 
After  this  Speed  had  to  point  out  to  him  that  he  had 
really  renewed  his  engagement.  Again  there  may  be 
some  uncertainty  whether  on  January  I,  1841,  the 
bridal  party  had  actually  assembled  and  the  bridegroom 
after  long  search  was  found  by  his  friends  wandering 
about  in  a  state  which  made  them  watch  day  and 
night  and  keep  knives  from  him.  But  it  is  quite  certain 
from  his  letters  that  in  some  such  way  on  "  the  fatal 
1st  of  January,  1841,"  he  broke  down  terribly.  Some 
weeks  later  he  wrote  to  his  partner :  "  Whether  I  shall 
ever  be  better  I  cannot  tell ;  I  awfully  forebode  I  shall 
not.  To  remain  as  I  am  is  impossible.  I  must  die  or 
be  better,  as  it  appears  to  me."  After  a  while  Speed 


82  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

was  able  to  remove  him  to  his  own  parents'  home  in 
Kentucky,  where  he  and  his  mother  nursed  him  back 
to  mental  life. 

Then  in  the  course  of  1841  Speed  himself  began  to 
contemplate  marriage,  and  Speed  himself  had  painful 
searchings  of  heart,  and  Lincoln's  turn  came  to  show  a 
sureness  of  perception  in  his  friend's  case  that  he  wholly 
lacked  in  his  own.  "  I  know,"  he  writes,  "  what  the 
painful  point  with  you  is  ...  it  is  an  apprehension 
that  you  do  not  love  her  as  you  should.  What  nonsense  ! 
How  came  you  to  court  her  ?  But  you  say  you 
reasoned  yourself  into  it.  What  do  you  mean  by  that  ? 
Was  it  not  that  you  found  yourself  unable  to  reason 
yourself  out  of  it  ?  Did  you  not  think,  and  partly  form 
the  purpose,  of  courting  her  the  first  time  you  ever 
saw  or  heard  of  her  ?  What  had  reason  to  do  with  it 
at  that  early  stage  ?  "  A  little  later  the  lady  of  Speed's 
love  falls  ill.  Lincoln  writes  :  "  I  hope  and  believe 
that  your  present  anxiety  about  her  health  and  her  life 
must  and  will  for  ever  banish  those  horrid  doubts  which 
I  know  you  sometimes  felt  as  to  the  truth  of  your 
affection  for  her.  .  .  .  Perhaps  this  point  is  no  longer 
a  question  with  you,  and  my  pertinacious  dwelling  upon 
it  is  a  rude  intrusion  upon  your  feelings.  If  so,  you 
must  pardon  me.  You  know  the  hell  I  have  suffered 
upon  that  point,  and  how  tender  I  am  upon  it."  When 
he  writes  thus  it  is  no  surprise  to  hear  from  him  that 
he  has  lost  his  hypochondria,  but  it  may  be  that  the 
keen  recollection  of  it  gives  him  excessive  anxieties  for 
Speed.  On  the  eve  of  the  wedding  he  writes  :  "  You 
will  always  hereafter  be  on  ground  that  I  have  never 
occupied,  and  consequently,  if  advice  were  needed,  I 
might  advise  wrong.  I  do  fondly  hope,  however,  that 
you  will  never  need  comfort  from  abroad.  I  incline  to 
think  it  probable  that  your  nerves  will  occasionally 
fail  you  for.  a  while  ;  but  once  you  get  them  firmly 
graded  now,  that  trouble  is  over  for  ever.  If  you  went 
through  the  ceremony  calmly  or  even  with  sufficient 
composure  not  to  excite  alarm  in  any  present,  you  are 
safe  beyond  question,  and  in  two  or  three  months,  to 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  83 

say  the  most,  will  be  the  happiest  of  men."  Soon  he 
is  reassured  and  can  "  feel  somewhat  jealous  of  both  of 
you  now.  You  will  be  so  exclusively  concerned  with  one 
another  that  I  shall  be  forgotten  entirely.  I  shall  feel 
very  lonesome  without  you."  And  a  little  later  :  "  It 
cannot  be  told  how  it  thrills  me  with  joy  to  hear  you  say 
you  are  far  happier  than  you  ever  expected  to  be.  I  know 
you  too  well  to  suppose  your  expectations  were  not  at 
least  sometimes  extravagant,  and  if  the  reality  exceeds 
them  all,  I  say,  6  Enough,  dear  Lord.'  3  And  here 
follows  what  might  perhaps  have  been  foreseen  :  "  Your 
last  letter  gave  me  more  pleasure  than  the  total  sum  of 
all  that  I  have  received  since  the  fatal  1st  of  January, 
1841.  Since  then  it  seems  to  me  I  should  have  been 
entirely  happy  but  for  the  never  absent  idea  that  there 
is  still  one  unhappy  whom  I  have  contributed  to  make 
so.  That  kills  my  soul.  I  cannot  but  reproach  myself 
for  even  wishing  to  be  happy  while  she  is  otherwise." 
Very  significantly  he  has  inquired  of  friends  how  that 
one  enjoyed  a  trip  on  the  new  railway  cars  to  Jackson 
ville,  and— not  being  like  Falkland  in  "  The  Rivals  "— 
praises  God  that  she  has  enjoyed  it  exceedingly. 

This  was  in  the  spring  of  1842.  Some  three  months 
later  he  writes  again  to  Speed  :  "  I  must  gain  confidence 
in  my  own  ability  to  keep  my  resolves  when  they  are 
made.  In  that  ability  I  once  prided  myself  as  the  only 
chief  gem  of  my  character.  That  gem  I  lost  how  and 
where  you  know  too  well.  I  have  not  regained  it,  and 
until  I  do  I  cannot  trust  myself  in  any  matter  of  much 
importance.  I  believe  now  that,  had  you  understood 
my  case  at  the  time  as  well  as  I  understood  yours 
afterwards,  by  the  aid  you  would  have  given  me  I  should 
have  sailed  through  clear.  ...  I  always  was  super 
stitious.  I  believe  God  made  me  one  of  the  instruments 
of  bringing  Fanny  and  you  together,  which  union  I 
have  no  doubt  He  had  fore-ordained.  Whatever  He 
designs  for  me  He  will  do.  '  Stand  still  and  see  the 
salvation  of  the  Lord,'  is  my  text  just  now.  If,  as  you 
say,  you  have  told  Fanny  all,  I  should  have  no  objection 
to  her  seeing  this  letter.  I  do  not  think  I  can  come  to 


84  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Kentucky  this  season.  I  am  so  poor  and  make  so  little 
headway  in  the  world  that  I  drop  back  in  a  month  of 
idleness  as  much  as  I  gain  in  a  year's  sowing."  At  last 
in  the  autumn  of  that  year  Lincoln  addresses  to  Speed 
a  question  at  once  so  shrewd  and  so  daringly  intimate 
as  perhaps  no  other  man  ever  asked  of  his  friend.  "  The 
immense  sufferings  you  endured  from  the  first  days  of 
September  till  the  middle  of  February  "  (the  date  of 
Speed's  wedding)  "  you  never  tried  to  conceal  from  me, 
and  I  well  understood.  You  have  now  been  the  husband 
of  a  lovely  woman  nearly  eight  months.  That  you  are 
happier  now  than  the  day  you  married  her  I  well  know. 
.  .  .  But  I  want  to  ask  a  close  question  !  c  Are  you  in 
feeling  as  well  as  in  judgment  glad  you  are  married  as 
you  are  ?  '  From  anybody  but  me  this  would  be  an 
impudent  question,  not  to  be  tolerated,  -but  I  know 
you  will  pardon  it  in  me.  Please  answer  it  quickly,  as 
I  am  impatient  to  know." 

Speed  remained  in  Kentucky  ;  Lincoln  was  too  poor 
for  visits  of  pleasure  ;  and  Speed  was  not  a  man  who 
cared  for  political  life ;  but  the  memorials,  from  which 
the  above  quotations  have  been  taken,  of  Lincoln's 
lasting  friendship  with  Speed  and  his  kind  mother,  who 
gave  Lincoln  a  treasured  Bible,  and  his  kind  young 
wife,  who  made  her  husband's  friend  her  own,  and 
whose  violet,  dropped  into  her  husband's  letter  to  him 
just  as  he  was  sealing  it,  was  among  the  few  flowers  that 
Lincoln  ever  appreciated,  throw  the  clearest  light  that 
we  can  anywhere  obtain  on  the  inner  mind  of  Lincoln. 

As  may  have  been  foreseen,  Mary  Todd  and  he  had 
met  again  on  a  friendly  footing.  A  managing  lady  is 
credited  with  having  brought  about  a  meeting  between 
them,  but  evidently  she  did  not  do  it  till  Lincoln  was 
at  least  getting  desirous  to  be  managed.  He  was 
much  absorbed  at  this  time  in  law  business,  to  which 
since  his  breakdown  he  had  applied  himself  more 
seriously.  It  was  at  this  period  too  that  his  notable 
address  on  temperance  was  given.  Soon  after  his 
meetings  with  Miss  Todd  began  again  he  involved  himself 
in  a  complication  of  a  different  kind.  He  had  written, 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  85 

partly,  it  seems,  for  the  young  lady's  amusement,  some 
innocent  if  uninteresting  political  skits  relating  to 
some  question  about  taxes.  This  brought  on  him  an 
unexpected  challenge  from  a  fiery  but  diminutive 
revenue  official,  one  Colonel  Shields,  a  prominent 
Democratic  politician.  Lincoln  availed  himself  of  the 
right  of  the,  challenged  to  impose  ridiculous  conditions 
of  combat,  partly  no  doubt  in  fun,  but  with  the  sensible 
object  also  of  making  sure  that  he  could  disarm  his 
antagonist  with  no  risk  of  harm  to  the  little  man.  The 
tangled  controversy  which  ensued  as  to  how  and  by 
whose  fault  the  duel  eventually  fell  through  has  nothing 
in  it  now,  but  the  whole  undignified  business  seems  to 
have  given  Lincoln  lasting  chagrin,  and  worried  him 
greatly  at  a  time  when  it  would  have  been  well  that  he 
should  be  cheerful. /At  last  on  November  4,  1842, 
when  Lincoln  was  nearly  thirty-three,  he  was  safely 
married.  The  wedding,  held,  according  to  the  prevailing 
custom,  in  a  private  house,  was  an  important  function, 
for  it  was  the  first  Episcopalian  wedding  that  good 
society  in  Springfield  had  witnessed.  Malicious  fortune 
brought  in  a  ludicrous  incident  at  the  last  moment,  for 
when  in  the  lawyerlike  verbiage  of  the  then  American 
Prayer-Book  the  brid'egroom  said,  "  With  this  ring  I 
thee  endow  with  all  my  goods,  chattels,  lands  and 
tenements,"  old  Judge  Brown  of  the  Illinois  Supreme 
Court,  who  had  never  heard  the  like,  impatiently  broke 
in,  "  God  Almighty,  Lincoln  !  The  statute  fixes  all 
that."  ) 

There  is  more  than  the  conventional  reason  for 
apology  for  pressing  the  subject  a  little  further.  Nothing 
very  illuminating  can  be  said  as  to  the  course  of  Lincoln's 
married  life,  but  much  has  already  been  made  public 
about  it  which,  though  it  cannot  be  taken  as  reaching  to 
the  heart  of  the  matter,  is  not  properly  to  be  dismissed 
as  mere  gossip.  Mrs.  Lincoln,  it  is  clear,  had  a  high 
temper — the  fact  that,  poor  woman  !  after  her  husband 
had  been  murdered  by  her  side,  she  developed  clear 
symptoms  of  insanity,  may  or  may  not,  for  all  we  are 
entitled  to  know,  be  relevant  in  this  regard.  She  was 


86  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

much  younger  than  her  husband,  and  had  gone  through 
a  cruel  experience  for  him.  Moreover,  she  had  proper  i 
ambitions  and  was  accustomed  to  proper  conventional  I 
refinements  ;  so  her  husband's  exterior  roughness  tried  j 
her  sorely,  not  the  less  we  may  be  sure  because  of  her  I 
real  pride  in  him.  Wife  and  tailor  combined  could  not,  1 
with  any  amount  of  money,  have  dressed  him  well.! 
Once,  though  they  kept  a  servant  then,  Lincoln  thought 
it  friendly  to  open  the  door  himself  in  his  shirt  sleeves 
when  two  most  elegant  ladies  came  to  call.  On  such 
occasions,  and  doubtless  on  other  occasions  of  less 
provocation,  Mrs.  Lincoln's  high  temper  was  let  loose. 
//It  seems  pretty  certain,  too,  that  he  met  her  with  mere 
^-forbearance,  sad  patience,  and  avoidance  of  conflict. 
His  fellow  lawyers  came  to  notice  that  he  stayed  away 
from  home  on  circuit  when  all  the  rest  of  them  could 
go  home  for  a  day  or  two.  Fifteen  years  after  his 
wedding  he  himself  confessed  to  his  trouble,  not  dis 
loyally,  but  in  a  rather  moving  remonstrance  with 
some  one  who  had  felt  intolerably  provoked  by  Mrs. 
Lincoln.  There  are  slight  indications  that  occasions 
of  difficulty  and  pain  to  Lincoln  happened  up  to  the 
end  of  his  life.  On  the  other  hand  there  are  slight 
indications  that  common  love  for  their  children  helped 
to  make  the  two  happier,  and  there  are  no  indications 
at  all  of  any  approach  to  a  serious  quarrel.  All  that  is 
told  us  may  be  perfectly  true  and  not  by  any  means 
have  justified  the  pity  that  some  of  Lincoln's  friends 
were  ready  to  feel  for  him.  It  is  difficult  to  avoid  sus 
pecting  that  Lincoln's  wife  did  not  duly  like  his  partner 
and  biographer,  Mr.  Herndon,  who  felt  it  his  duty  to 
record  so  many  painful  facts  and  his  own  possibly  too 
painful  impression  from  them.  On  the  other  side 
Mr.  Herndon  makes  it  clear  that  in  some  respects  Mrs.  \ 
Lincoln  was  an  admirable  wife  for  her  husband.  She 
faced  the  difficulties  of  their  poverty  with  spirit  and 
resolution^  Testimony  from  other  sources  to  her  grace 
ful  hospitality  abounds.  More  than  this,  from  the 
very  first  she  believed  in  his  powers.  It  seems  she  had 
the  discernment  to  know,  when  few  others  can  have 


LINCOLN'S  EARLY  CAREER  87 

done  so,  how  far  greater  lie  was  than  his  rival  Douglas. 
It  was  Herndon's  belief,  in  days  when  he  and  Mrs. 
Lincoln  were  the  two  persons  who  saw  most  of  him, 
that  she  sustained  his  just  ambition,  and  that  at  the 
most  critical  moment  of  his  personal  career  she  had) 
the  courage  to  make  him  refuse  an  attractive  appoint-! 
ment  which  must  have  ruined  it.     The  worst  that  we  \ 
are  told  with  any  certainty  amounts  to  this,  that  like  the  \ 
very  happily  married  writer  of  "  Virginibus  Puerisque," 
Lincoln  discovered  that  marriage  is  "  a  field  of  battle 
and  not  a  bed   of   roses  " — a   battle   in   which  we   are 
forced  to  suspect  that  he  did  not  play  his  full  part. 

We  should  perhaps  be  right  in  associating  his  curious 
record,  of  right  and  high  regard  for  women  and  in 
efficiency  where  a  particular  woman's  happiness  de 
pended  on  him,  with  the  belief  in  Woman  Suffrage, 
which  he  early  adopted  and  probably  retained.  Be 
that  as  it  may,  this  part  of  his  story  points  to  something 
which  runs  through  his  whole  character,  something 
which  perhaps  may  be  expressed  by  saying  that  the 
natural  bias  of  his  qualities  was  towards  the  negative 
side.  We  hear,  no  doubt,  of  occasions  when  his  vigour 
was  instant  and  terrible — like  that  of  Hamlet  on  the 
ship  for  England  ;  but  these  were  occasions  when  the 
right  or  the  necessity  of  the  case  was  obvious.  We 
have  seen  him  also  firm  and  absolutely  independent 
where  his  conviction  had  already  been  thought  out. 
Where  there  was  room  for  further  reflection,  for  patiently 
waiting  on  events,  or  for  taking  counsel  of  wise  friends, 
manly  decision  had  not  come  easily  to  him.  He  had 
let  a  third  person  almost  engage  him  to  Miss  Owens. 
Once  in  this  relation  to  her,  he  had  let  it  be  the  woman's 
part  and  not  the  man's  to  have  decision  enough  for 
the  two.  Speed  had  to  tell  him  that  he  must  face 
Miss  Todd  and  speak  to  her,  and  Speed  again  had  to 
make  clear  to  him  what  the  effect  of  his  speaking  had 
been.  In  time  he  decided  what  he  thought  his  own 
feelings  were,  but  it  was  by  inference  from  the  feelings 
of  Speed.  Lastly,  it  seems,  the  troubles  of  his  married 
life  were  met  by  mere  patience  and  avoidance.  All 


88  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

this,  of  course,  concerned  a  side  of  life's  affairs  in  regard 
to  which,  his  mind  had  suffered  painful  shocks  ;  but  it 
shows  the  direction  of  his  possible  weakness  and  his 
possible  strength  in  other  things.  It  falls  in  with  a 
trait  which  he  himself  noted  in  one  of  the  letters  to 
Speed  :  "  I  have  no  doubt,"  he  writes,  "  it  is  the  peculiar 
misfortune  of  both  you  and  me  to  dream  dreams  of 
Elysium  far  exceeding  all  that  anything  earthly  can 
realise."  All  such  men  have  to  go  through  deep  waters  ; 
but  they  do  not  necessarily  miss  either  success  or 
happiness  in  the  end.  Lincoln's  life  may  be  said  to 
have  tested  him  by  the  test  which  Mr.  Kipling  states  in 
his  lines  about  Washington  : — 

"  If  you  can  dream — and  not  make  dreams  your  master ; 
If  you  can  think — and  not  make  thoughts  your  aim." 

He  was  to  prove  that  he  could  do  this  ;  it  is  for  the 
following  pages  to  show  in  how  high  a  degree.  Mean 
while  one  thing  should  already  be  clear  about  him. 
No  shrewd  judge  of  men  could  read  his  letters  to  Speed 
with  care  and  not  feel  that,  whatever  mistakes  this  man 
might  commit,  fundamentally  he  was  worthy  of  entire 
trust.  That,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  is  what,  to  the  end 
of  his  life,  Speed  and  all  the  men  who  knew  him  and  an 
ever  widening  circle  of  men  who  had  to  judge  by  more 
casual  impressions  did  feel  about  Lincoln.  Whatever 
was  questionable  in  his  private  or  public  acts,  his  own 
explanation,  if  he  happened  to  give  one,  would  be 
taken  by  them  as  the  full  and  naked  truth,  and,  if 
there  was  no  known  explanation,  it  remained  to  them 
an  irrebuttable  presumption  that  his  main  intention  was 
right. 


CHAPTER  IV 

LINCOLN    IN    CONGRESS    AND    IN    RETIREMENT 

i.  The  Mexican  War  and  Lincoln's  Work  in  Congress. 

LINCOLN  had  ceased  before  his  marriage  to  sit  in  the 
Illinois  Legislature.  He  had  won  sufficient  standing  for 
his  ambition  to  aim  higher  ;  a  former  law  partner  of 
his  was  now  in  Congress,  and  he  wished  to  follow.  But  ll 
he  had  to  submit  to  a  few  years'  delay  of  which  the 
story  is  curious  and  honourable.  His  rivals  for  the 
representation  of  his  own  constituency  were  two  fellow 
Whigs,  Baker  and  Hardin,  both  of  whom  afterwards 
bore  distinguished  parts  in  the  Mexican  war  and  with 
both  of  whom  he  was  friendly.  Somewhat  to  his 
disgust  at  a  party  gathering  in  his  own  county  in  1843, 
Baker  was  preferred  to  him.  A  letter  of  his  gives  a 
shrewd  account  of  the  manoeuvres  among  members  of 
various  Churches  which  brought  this  about  ;  it  is 
curiously  careful  not  to  overstate  the  effect  of  these 
influences  and  characteristically  denies  that  Baker  had 
part  in  them.  To  make  the  thing  harder,  he  was  sent 
from  this  meeting  to  a  convention,  for  the  whole  con 
stituency,  with  which  the  nomination  lay,  and  his  duty, 
of  course,  was  to  work  for  Baker.  Here  it  became 
obvious  that  Hardin  would  be  chosen  ;  nothing  could 
be  done  for  Baker  at  that  time,  but  Lincoln,  being 
against  his  will  there  in  Baker's  interests,  took  an 
opportunity  in  the  bargaining  that  took  place  to  advance 
Baker's  claim,  to  the  detriment  of  his  own,  to  be 
Hardin's  successor  two  years  later. 

By  some  perverse  accident  notes  about  details  of 
party  management  fill  a  disproportionate  space  among 
those  letters  of  Lincoln's  which  have  been  preserved,  but 
these  reveal  that,  with  all  his  business-like  attention  to 


90  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  affairs  of  his  very  proper  ambition,  he  was  able 
throughout  to  illuminate  dull  matters  of  this  order  with 
action  of  singular  disinterestedness.  After  being  a  second 
time  postponed,  no  doubt  to  the  advantage  of  his  law 
business,  he^took  hisj^atin  theJHouse  of  Representatives 
at  Washington  for  two  ^ars^in  the  spring  of  1847. 
Two  srTorfsessions  can  hardly^suffice  for  mastering  the 
very  complicated  business  of  that  body.  He  made 
hardly  any  mark.  He  probably  learned  much  and  was 
able  to  study  at  leisure  the  characters  of  his  brother 
politicians.  He  earned  the  valuable  esteem  of  some, 
and  seems  to  have  passed  as  a  very  pleasant,  honest, 
plain  specimen  of  the  rough  West.  Like  others  of 
the  younger  Congressmen,  he  had  the  privilege  of 
breakfasting  with  Webster.  His  brief  career  in  the 
House  seems  to  have  disappointed  him,  and  it  certainly 
dissatisfied  his  constituents.  The  part  that  he  played 
may  impress  us  more  favourably  than  it  did  them, 
but,  slight  as  it  was,  it  requires  a  historical  explanation. 
/  Mexico  had  detached  itself  from  Spain  in  1826,  and 
in  1833  the  province  of  Texas  detached  itself  from 
Mexico.  Texas  was  largely  peopled  by  immigrants  from 
the  States,  and  these  had  grievances.  One  of  them 
was  that  Mexico  abolished  slavery,  but  there  was  real 
misgovernment  as  well,  and,  among  other  cruel  incidents 
of  the  rebellion  which  followed,  the  massacre  of  rebels 
at  Alamo  stamped  itself  on  American  memory.  The 
Republic  of  Texas  began  to  seek  annexation  to  the 
United  States  in  1839,  but  there  was  opposition  in  the 
\  States  and  there  were  difficulties  with  Mexico  and  other 
I  Governments.  At  last  in  1845,  at  the  very  close  of  his 
|  term  of  office,  President  Tyler  got  the  annexation 
;  pushed  through  in  defiance  of  the  Whigs  who  made 
him  President.  Mexico  broke  off  diplomatic  relations, 
but  peace  could  no  doubt  have  been  preserved  if  peace 
had  been  any  object  with  the  new  President  Polk  or 
with  the  Southern  leaders  whose  views  he  represented. 
They  had  set  their  eyes  upon  a  further  acquisition, 
larger  even  than  Texas — California,  and  the  whole  of 
t}ie  territories,  still  belonging  to  Mexico,  to  the  east 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    91 

of  it.  It  is  not  contested,  and  would  not  have  been 
contested  then,  that  the  motive  of  their  policy  was  the 
Southern  desire  to  win  further  soil  for  cultivation  by 
slaves.  But  there  was  no  great  difficulty  in  gaining 
some  popularity  for  their  designs  in  the  North.  Talk 
about  "  our  manifest  destiny  "  to  reach  the  Pacific 
may  have  been  justly  described  by  Parson  Wilbur 
as  "  half  on  it  ign'ance  and  t'other  half  rum,"  but 
it  is  easy  to  see  how  readily  it  might  be  taken  up, 
and  indeed  many  Northerners  at  that  moment  had  a 
fancy  of  their  own  for  expansion  in  the  North-West 
and  were  not  over-well  pleased  with  Polk  when,  in 
1846,  he  set  the  final  seal  upon  the  settlement  with 
Great  Britain  of  the  Oregon  frontier. 

When  he  did  this  Polk  had  already  brought  about 
his  own  war.  The  judgment  on  that  war  expressed 
at  the  time  in  the  first  "  Biglow  Papers  "  has  seldom  been 
questioned  since,  and  there  seldom  can  have  been  a 
war  so  sternly  condemned  by  soldiers — Grant  amongst 
others — who  fought  in  it  gallantly.  The  facts  seem  to 
have  been  just  as  Lincoln  afterwards  recited  them  in 
Congress.  The  Rio  Grande,  which  looks  a  reasonable 
frontier  on  a  map,  was  claimed  by  the  United  States 
as  the  frontier  of  Texas.  The  territory  occupied  by 
the  American  settlers  of  Texas  reached  admittedly  up 
to  and  beyond  the  River  Nueces,  east  of  the  Rio 
Grande.  But  in  a  sparsely  settled  country,  where 
water  is  not  abundant,  the  actual  border  line,  if  there 
be  any  clear  line,  between  settlement  from  one  side 
and  settlement  from  the  other  will  not  for  the  con 
venience  of  treaty-makers  run  along  a  river,  but  rather 
for  the  convenience  of  the  settlers  along  the  water- 
parting  between  two  rivers.  So  Mexico  claimed  both 
banks  of  the  Rio  Grande  and  Spanish  settlers  inhabited 
both  sides.  Polk  ordered  General  Zachary  Taylor, 
who  was  allowed  no  discretion  in  the  matter,  to  march 
troops  right  up  to  the  Rio  Grande  and  occupy  a  position 
commanding  the  encampment  of  the  Mexican  soldiers 
there.  The  Mexican  commander,  thus  threatened, 
attacked.  The  Mexicans  had  thus  begun  the  war. 


92  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Polk  could  thus  allege  his  duty  to  prosecute  it.  When 
the  whole  transaction  was  afterwards  assailed  his 
critics  might  be  tempted  to  go,  or  represented  as  going, 
upon  the  false  ground  that  only  Congress  can  con 
stitutionally  declare  war — that  is,  of  course,  sanction 
purely  offensive  operations.  Long,  however,  before 
the  dispute  could  come  to  a  head,  the  brilliant  successes 
of  General  Taylor  and  still  more  of  General  Scott,  with 
a  few  trained  troops  against  large  undisciplined  numbers, 
put  all  criticism  at  a  disadvantage.  The  city  of  Mexico 
was  occupied  by  Scott  in  September,  1847,  and  peace, 
with  the  cession  of  the  vast  domain  that  had  been 
coveted,  was  concluded  in  May,  1848. 

War  having  begun,  the  line  of  the  Whig  opposition 
was  to  vote  supplies  and  protest  as  best  they  might 
against  the- language  endorsing  Folk's  policy  which,  in 
the  pettiest  spirit  of  political  manoeuvre,  was  sometimes 
incorporated  in  the  votes.  In  this  Lincoln  steadily 
supported  them.  One  of  his  only  two  speeches  of  any 
length  in  Congress  was  made  on  the  occasion  of  a  vote 
of  this  kind  in  1848.  The  subject  was  by  that  time  so 
stale  that  his  speech  could  hardly  make  much  im 
pression,  but  it  appears  to-day  an  extraordinarily  clear, 
strong,  upright  presentment  of  the  complex  and  un 
popular  case  against  the  war.  His  other  long  speech 
is  elevated  above  buffoonery  by  a  brief,  cogent,  and 
earnest  passage  on  the  same  theme,  but  it  was  a  frank 
piece  of  clowning  on  a  licensed  occasion.  It  was  the 
fashion  for  the  House  when  its  own  dissolution  and  a 
Presidential  election  were  both  imminent  to  have  a  sort 
of  rhetorical  scrimmage  in  which  members  on  both  sides 
spoke  for  the  edification  of  their  own  constituencies  and 
that  of  Buncombe.  The  Whigs  were  now  happy  in  having 
"  diverted  the  war-thunder  against  the  Democrats  "  by 
running  for  the  Presidency  General  Taylor,  a  good 
soldier  who  did  not  know  whether  he  was  a  Whig  or  a 
Democrat,  but  who,  besides  being  a  hero  of  the  war, 
was  inoffensive  to  the  South  as  being  a  Kentucky  man 
with  some  slaves  of  his  own.  It  is  characteristic  of  the 
time  that  the  Democrats,  in  whose  counsels  the  Southern 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    93 

men  prevailed,  now  began  a  practice  of  choosing  Northern 
candidates,  and  nominated  General  Cass  of  Michigan, 
whose  distinction  had  not  been  won  in  war.  The 
Democratic  Congressmen  in  this  debate  made  game  of 
the  Whigs,  with  their  war-hero,  and  seem  to  have 
carried  a  crude  manner  of  pleasantry  pretty  far  when 
Lincoln  determined  to  show  them  that  they  could  be 
beaten  at  that  game.  He  seems  to  have  succeeded 
admirably,  with  a  burlesque  comparison,  too  long  to 
quote,  of  General  Cass's  martial  exploits  with  his  own, 
and  other  such-like  matter  enhanced  by  the  most  extra 
vagant  Western  manner  and  delivery. 

Anyone  who  reads  much  of  the  always  grave  and 
sometimes  most  moving  orations  of  Lincoln's  later 
years  may  do  well  to  turn  back  to  this  agreeable  piece 
of  debating-society  horse-play.  But  he  should  then 
turn  a  few  pages  further  back  to  Lincoln's  little  Bill  for 
the  gradual  and  compensated  extinction  of  slavery  in 
the  district  of  Columbia,  where  Washington  stands. 
He  introduced  this  of  his  own  motion,  without  en 
couragement  from  Abolitionist  or  Non-Abolitionist, 
accompanying  it  with  a  brief  statement  that  he  had 
carefully  ascertained  that  the  representative  people  of 
the  district  privately  approved  of  it,  but  had  no  right 
to  commit  them  to  public  support  of  it.  It  perished, 
of  course.  With  the  views  which  he  had  long  formed 
and  continued  to  hold  about  slavery,  very  few  oppor 
tunities  could  in  these  years  come  to  him  of  proper  and 
useful  action  against  it.  He  seized  upon  these  oppor 
tunities  not  less  because  in  doing  so  he  had  to  stand 
alone. 

His  career  as  a  Congressman  was  soon  over.     There  f 
was  no  movement  to  re-elect  him,  and  the  Whigs  now  \ 
lost  his  constituency.     His  speeches  and  his  votes  against 
the  Mexican  war  offended  his  friends.     Even  his  partner, 
the  Abolitionist,  Mr.  Herndon,  whose  further  acquaint 
ance  we  have  to  make,  was  too  much  infected  with  the 
popularity  of  a  successful  war  to  understand  Lincoln's 
plain  position  or  to  approve  of  his  giving  votes  which  might 
seem  unpatriotic.     Lincoln  wrote  back  to  him  firmly  but 


94  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

sadly.  Persuaded  as  he  was  that  political  action  in 
advance  of  public  sentiment  was  idle,  resigned  and 
hardened  as  we  might  easily  think  him  to  many  of  the 
necessities  of  party  discipline,  it  evidently  caused  him 
naive  surprise  that,  when  he  was  called  upon  for  a 
definite  opinion,  anybody  should  expect  him,  as  he 
candidly  puts  it,  to  "  tell  a  lie." 

As  a  retiring  Congressman  he  was  invited  to  speak  in 
several  places  in  the  east  on  behalf  of  Taylor's  can 
didature  ;  and  after  Taylor's  election  claimed  his  right 
as  the  proper  person  to  be  consulted,  with  certain 
others,  about  Government  appointments  in  Illinois. 
Taylor  carried  out  the  "  spoils  system "  with  con 
scientious  thoroughness  ;  as  he  touchingly  said,  he  had 
thought  over  the  question  from  a  soldier's  point  of 
view,  and  could  not  bear  the  thought  that,  while  he 
as  their  chief  enjoyed  the  Presidency,  the  private 
soldiers  in  the  Whig  ranks  should  not  get  whatever  was 
going.  Lincoln's  attitude  in  the  matter  may  be  of 
interest.  To  take  an  example,  he  writes  to  the  President, 
about  the  postmastership  in  some  place,  that  he  does 
not  know  whether  the  President  desires  to  change  the 
tenure  of  such  offices  on  party  grounds,  and  offers  no 
advice  ;  that  A  is  a  Whig  whose  appointment  is  much 
desired  by  the  local  Whigs,  and  a  most  respectable  man  ; 
that  B,  also  a  Whig,  would  in  Lincoln's  judgment  be  a 
somewhat  better  but  not  so  popular  subject  for  appoint 
ment  ;  that  C,  the  present  postmaster,  is  a  Democrat, 
but  is  on  every  ground,  save  his  political  party,  a 
proper  person  for  the  office.  There  was  an  office  which 
^  he  himself  desired,  it  was  that  of("  Commissioner  of  the 
General  Land  Office,"  a  new  office  in  Washington  dealing 
with  settlement  on  Government  lands  in  the  West/)  He 
was  probably  well  suited  to  it  ;  but  his  application  was 
delayed  by  the  fact  that  friends  in  Illinois  wanted  the 
post  too  ;  a  certain  Mr.  Butterfield  (a  lawyer  renowned 
for  his  jokes,  which  showed,  it  is  said,  "  at  least  a 
well-marked  humorous  intention ")  got  it ;  and  then 
it  fell  to  the  lot  of  the  disappointed  Lincoln  to  have 
to  defend  Butterfield  against  some  unfair  attack. 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    95 


But  a  tempting  offer  was  made  him,  that  of 
Governorship  of  Oregon  Territory,  and  he  wavered 
before  refusing  to  take  work  which  would,  as  it 
happened,  have  kept  him  far  away  when  the  oppor 
tunity  of  his  life  came.  It  was  Mrs.  Lincoln  who  would 
not  let  him  cut  himself  off  so  completely  from  politics. 
As  for  himself,  it  is  hard  to  resist  the  impression  that  he 
was  at  this  time  a  tired  man,  disappointed  as  to  the 
progress  of  his  career  and  probably  also  disappointed 
and  somewhat  despondent  about  politics  and  the 
possibilities  of  good  service  that  lay  open  to  politicians. 
It  may  be  that  this  was  partly  the  reason  why  he  was 
not  at  all  aroused  by  the  crisis  in  American  politics 
which  must  now  be  related. 

2.  California  and  the  Compromise  of  1850. 

It  has  been  said  that  the  motive  for  the  conquests 
from  Mexico  was  the  desire  for  slave  territory.  The 
attractive  part  of  the  new  dominion  was  of  course 
California.  Arizona  and  New  Mexico  are  arid  regions, 
and  the  mineral  wealth  of  Nevada  was  unknown.  The 
peacefully  acquired  region  of  Oregon,  far  north,  need  not 
concern  us,  but  Oregon  became  a  free  State  in  1859. 
Early  in  the  war  a  struggle  began  between  Northerners 
and  Southerners  (to  a  large  extent  independent  of 
party)  in  the  Senate  and  the  House  as  to  whether 
slavery  should  be  allowed  in  the  conquered  land  or  not. 
David  Wilmot,  a  Northern  Democratic  Republican, 
proposed  a  proviso  to  the  very  first  money  grant  con 
nected  with  the  war,  that  slavery  should  be  forbidden 
in  any  territory  to  be  annexed.  The  "  Wilmot  Proviso  " 
was  proposed  again  on  every  possible  occasion  ;  Lincoln, 
by  the  way,  sturdily  supported  it  while  in  Congress  ;  it 
was  always  voted  down.  Cass  proposed  as  a  solution 
of  all  difficulties  that  the  question  of  slavery  should  be 
left  to  the  people  of  the  new  Territories  or  States  them 
selves.  The  American  public,  apt  at  condensing  an 
argument  into  a  phrase,  dismissed  Cass's  principle  for 
the  time  being  with  the  epithet  "  squatter  sovereignty." 
Calhoun  an.d  his  friends  said  it  was  contrary  to  the 


V 


96  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Constitution  that  an  American  citizen  should  not  be 
free  to  move  with  his  property,  including  his  slaves, 
into  territory  won  by  the  Union.  The  annexation  was 
carried  out,  and  the  question  of  slavery  was  unsettled. 
Then  events  took  a  surprising  turn. 

In  the  winter  of  1848  gold  was  discovered  in  California. 
Throughout  1849  gold-seekers  came  pouring  in  from 
every  part  of  the  world.  This  miscellaneous  new 
people,  whose  rough  ways  have  been  more  celebrated  in 
literature  than  those  of  any  similar  crowd,  lived  at  first 
in  considerable  anarchy,  but  they  determined  without 
delay  to  set  up  some  regular  system  of  government. 
In  the  course  of  1849  they  elected  a  Convention  to  draw 
up  a  State  Constitution,  and  to  the  astonishment  of  all 
the  States  the  Convention  unanimously  made  the 
prohibition  of  slavery  part  of  that  Constitution.  There 
was  no  likelihood  that,  with  a  further  influx  of  settlers 
of  the  same  sort,  this  decision  of  California  would  alter. 
Was  California  to  be  admitted  as  a  State  with  this 
Constitution  of  its  own  choice,  which  the  bulk  of  the 
people  of  America  approved  ? 

To  politicians  of  the  school  now  fully  developed  in 
\  the  South  there  seemed  nothing  outrageous  in  saying 
\  that  it  should  be  refused  admission.  To  them  Calhoun's 
argument,  which  regarded  a  citizen's  slave  as  his  chattel 
in  the  same  sense  as  his  hat  or  walking-stick,  seemed 
the  ripe  fruit  of  logic.  It  did  not  shock  them  in  the 
least  that  they  were  forcing  the  slave  system  on  an 
unwilling  community,  for  were  not  the  Northerners 
prepared  to  force  the  free  system  ?  A  prominent 
Southern  Senator,  talking  with  a  Northern  colleague 
a  little  later,  said  triumphantly  :  "  I  see  how  it  is. 
You  may  force  freedom  as  much  as  you  like,  but  we  are 
to  beware  how  we  force  slavery,"  and  was  surprised  that 
the  Northerner  cheerfully  accepted  this  position.  It  is 
necessary  to  remember  throughout  the  following  years 
that,  whatever  ordinary  Southerners  thought  in  private, 
their  whole  political  action  was  now  based  on  the 
assumption  that  slavery,  as  it  was,  was  an  institution 
\  which  no  reasonable  man  could  think  wrong. 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    97 

Zachary  Taylor,  unlike  Harrison,  the  previous  hero  of 
the  Whigs,  survived  his  inauguration  by  sixteen  months. 
He  was  no  politician  at  all,  but  placed  in  the  position  of 
President  for  which  fairness  and  firmness  were  really 
the  greatest  qualifications,  he  was  man  enough  to  rely 
on  his  own  good  sense.  He  had  come  to  Washington 
under  the  impression  that  the  disputes  which  raged 
there  were  due  to  the  aggressiveness  of  the  North  ;  a 
very  little  time  there  convinced  him  of  the  contrary. 
Slave-owner  as  he  was,  the  claim  of  the  South  to  force 
slavery  on  California  struck  him  as  an  arrogant  pre 
tension,  and  so  far  as  matters  rested  with  him,  he  was 
simply  not  to  be  moved  by  it.  He  sent  a  message  to 
Congress  advising  the  admission  of  California  with  the 
constitution  of  its  own  choice.  When,  as  we  shall 
shortly  see,  the  great  men  of  the  Senate  thought  the 
case  demanded  conciliation  and  a  great  scheme  of 
compromise,  he  resolutely  disagreed  ;  he  used  the 
whole  of  his  influence  against  their  compromise,  and  it 
is  believed  with  good  reason  that  he  would  have  put 
his  veto  as  President  on  the  chief  measure  in  which  the 
compromise  issued.  If  he  had  lived  to  carry  out  his 
policy,  it  seems  possible  that  there  would  have  been  an 
attempt  to  execute  the  threats  of  secession  which  were 
muttered — this  time  in  Virginia.  But  it  is  almost 
certain  that  at  that  time,  and  with  the  position  which 
he  occupied,  he  would  have  been  able  to  quell  the 
movement  at  once.  There  is  nothing  to  suggest  that 
Taylor  was  a  man  of  any  unusual  gifts  of  intellect,  but 
he  had  what  we  may  call  character,  and  it  was  the  one 
thing  wanting  in  political  life  at  the  time.  The  greatest 
minds  in  American  politics,  as  we  shall  see,  viewed  the 
occasion  otherwise,  but,  in  the  light  of  what  followed,  it 
seems  a  signal  and  irreparable  error  that,  when  the  spirit 
of  aggression  rising  in  the  South  had  taken  definite  shape 
in  a  demand  which  was  manifestly  wrongful,  it  was 
bought  off  and  not  met  with  a  straightforward  refusal. 
Taylor  died  in  the  course  of  1850  and  Vice-President 
Millard  Fillmore,  of  New  York,  succeeded  him. 
Fillmore  had  an  appearance  of  grave  and  benign  wisdom 


98  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

which  led  a  Frenchman  to  describe  him  as  the  ideal  ruler 
of  a  Republic,  but  he  was  a  pattern  of  that  outwardly 
dignified,  yet  nerveless  and  heartless  respectability, 
which  was  more  dangerous  to  America  at  that  period 
than  political  recklessness  or  want  of  scruple. 

The  actual  issue  of  the  crisis  was  that  the  admission 
of  California  was  bought  from  the  South  by  large 
concessions  in  other  directions.  This  was  the  proposal 
of  Henry  Clay,  who  was  now  an  old  man  anxious  for 
the  Union,  but  had  been  a  lover  of  such  compromises 
ever  since  he  promoted  the  Missouri  Compromise  thirty 
years  ago ;  but,  to  the  savage  indignation  of  some  of 
his  Boston  admirers,  Webster  used  the  whole  force  of 
his  influence  and  debating  power  in  support  of  Clay.  The 
chief  concessions  made  to  the  South  were  two.  In  the 
first  place  Territorial  Governments  were  set  up  in  New 
Mexico  and  Utah  (since  then  the  home  of  the  Mormons) 
without  any  restriction  on  slavery.  This  concession  was 
defended  in  the  North  on  the  ground  that  it  was  a  sham, 
because  the  physical  character  of  those  regions  made 
successful  slave  plantations  impossible  there.  But  it 
was,  of  course,  a  surrender  of  the  principle  which  had 
been  struggled  for  in  the  Wilmot  Proviso  during  the 
last  four  years  ;  and  the  Southern  leaders  showed  the 
clearness  of  their  limited  vision  by  valuing  it  just  upon 
that  ground.  There  had  been  reason  for  the  territorial 
concessions  to  slavery  in  the  past  generation  because  it 
was  established  in  the  territories  concerned  ;  but  there 
was  no  such  reason  now.  The  second  concession  was 
that  of  a  new  Federal  law  to  ensure  the  return  of  fugitive 
slaves  from  the  free  States.  The  demand  for  this  was 
partly  factitious,  for  the  States  in  the  far  South,  which 
were  not  exposed  to  loss  of  slaves,  were  the  most  in 
sistent  on  it,  and  it  would  appear  that  the  Southern 
leaders  felt  it  politic  to  force  the  acceptance  of  the 
measure  in  a  form  which  would  humiliate  their  opponents. 
There  is  no  escape  from  the  contention,  which  Lincoln 
especially  admitted  without  reserve,  that  the  enactment 
of  an  effective  Act  of  this  sort  was,  if  demanded,  due 
under  the  provisions  of  the  Constitution  ;  but  the 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    99 

measure  actually  passed  was  manifestly  defiant  of  all 
principles  of  justice.  It  was  so  framed  as  almost  to 
destroy  the  chance  which  a  lawfully  free  negro  might  have 
of  proving  his  freedom,  if  arrested  by  the  professional 
slave-hunters  as  a  runaway.  It  was  the  sort  of  Act 
which  a  President  should  have  vetoed  as  a  fraud  upon 
the  Constitution.  Thus  over  and  above  the  objection, 
now  plain,  to  any  compromise,  the  actual  compromise 
proposed  was  marked  by  flagrant  wrong.  But  it  was 
put  through  by  the  weight  of  Webster  and  Clay. 

This  event  marks  the  close  of  a  period.  It  was  the 
last  achievement  of  Webster  and  Clay,  both  of  whom 
passed  away  in  1852  in  the  hope  that  they  had  per 
manently  pacified  the  Union.  Calhoun,  their  great 
contemporary,  had  already  died  in  1850,  gloomily 
presaging  and  lamenting  the  coming  danger  to  the 
Union  which  was  so  largely  his  own  creation.  For  a 
while  the  cheerful  view  of  Webster  and  Clay  seemed 
better  justified.  There  had  been  angry  protest  in  the 
North  against  the  Fugitive  Slave  Law  ;  there  was  some 
forcible  resistance  to  arrests  of  negroes  ;  and  some 
States  passed  Protection  of  Liberty  Acts  of  their  own  to 
impede  the  Federal  law  in  its  working.  But  the 
excitement  which  had  flared  up  suddenly,  died  down  as 
suddenly.  In  the  Presidential  election  of  1 85  2  Northerners 
generally  reflected  that  they  wanted  quiet  and  had 
an  instinct,  curiously  falsified,  that  the  Democratic  party 
was  the  more  likely  to  give  it  them.  The  Whigs  again 
proposed-  a  hero,  General  Scott,  a  greater  soldier  than 
Taylor,  but  a  vainer  man,  who  mistakenly  broke  with 
all  precedent  and  went  upon  the  stump  for  himself. 
The  President  who  was  elected,  Franklin  Pierce  of  New 
Hampshire,  a  friend  of  Hawthorne,  might  perhaps 
claim  the  palm,  among  the  Presidents  of  those  days, 
for  sheer,  deleterious  insignificance.  The  favourite  ob 
servation  of  his  contemporaries  upon  him  was  that  he 
was  a  gentleman,  but  his  convivial  nature  made  the  social 
attractiveness  of  Southern  circles  in  Washington  over 
powering  to  any  brain  or  character  that  he  may  have 
possessed.  A  new  generation  of  political  personages 


ioo  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

now  came  to  the  front.  Jefferson  Davis  of  Mississippi, 
a  man  of  force  and  considerable  dignity,  began  to  take 
the  leading  part  in  the  powerful  group  of  Southern 
Senators  ;  Stephen  Douglas,  of  Illinois,  rapidly  became 
the  foremost  man  of  the  Democratic  party  generally ; 
William  Seward,  late  Governor  of  New  York,  and 
Salmon  Chase,  a  Democrat,  late  Governor  of  Ohio,  had 
played  a  manful  part  in  the  Senate  in  opposition  to 
Webster  and  Clay  and  their  compromise.  From  this 
time  on  we  must  look  on  these  two,  joined  a  little  later 
by  Charles  Sumner  of  Massachusetts,  as  the  obvious 
leaders  in  the  struggle  against  slavery  which  was  shortly 
to  be  renewed,  and  in  which  Lincoln's  part  seemed  likely 
to  remain  a  humble  one. 

3.  Lincoln  in  Retirement. 

Whether  Seward  and  Chase  and  the  other  opponents 
of  the  Compromise  were  right,  as  it  now  seems  they 
were,  or  not,  Lincoln  was  not  the  man  who  in  the 
unlooked-for  crisis  of  1850  would  have  been  likely  to 
make  an  insurrectionary  stand  against  his  old  party- 
leader  Clay,  and  the  revered  constitutional  authority 
of  Webster.  He  had  indeed  little  opportunity  to  do  so 
in  Illinois,  but  his  one  recorded  speech  of  this  period, 
an  oration  to  a  meeting  of  both  parties  on  the  death  of 
Clay  in  1852,  expresses  approval  of  the  Compromise. 
This  speech,  which  is  significant  of  the  trend  of  his 
thoughts  at  this  time,  does  not  lend  itself  to  brief  extracts 
because  it  is  wanting  in  the  frankness  of  his  speeches 
before  and  after.  A  harsh  reference  to  Abolitionists 
serves  to  disguise  the  fact  that  the  whole  speech  is 
animated  by  antagonism  to  slavery.  The  occasion  and 
the  subject  are  used  with  rather  disagreeable  subtlety 
to  insinuate  opposition  to  slavery  into  the  minds  of  a 
cautious  audience.  The  speaker  himself  seems  satisfied 
with  the  mood  of  mere  compromise  which  had  governed 
Clay  in  this  matter,  or  rather  perhaps  he  is  twisting 
Clay's  attitude  into  one  of  more  consistent  opposition 
to  slavery  than  he  really  showed.  (In  any  case  we  can 
be  quite  sure  that  the  moderate  and  subtle  but  intensely 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS. AND  RETIREMENT    101 

firm  opinion  with  which,  a  little  later  Lincoln  returned  to 
political  strife  was  the  product  of  long  and  deep  and 
anxious  thought  during  the  years  from  1849  to  1854. 
On  the  surface  it  did  not  go  far  beyond  the  condemnation 
of  slavery  and  acceptance  of  the  Constitution  which 
had  guided  him  earlier,  nor  did  it  seem  to  differ  frorr 
the  wide-spread  public  opinion  which  in  1854  created  z 
new  party;  but  there  was  this  difference  that  Lincoln\ 
had  by  then  looked  at  the  matter  in  all  its  bearings,  and 
prepared  his  mind  for  all  eventualities.  We  shall  find, 
and  need  not  be  surprised  to  find,  that  he  who  now  hung 
back  a  little,  and  who  later  moved  when  public  opinion 
moved,  later  still  continued  to  move  when  public 
opinion  had  receded. 

What  we  know  of  these  years  of  private  life  is  mainly 
due  to  Mr.  William  Herndon,  the  young  lawyer  already 
quoted,  whom  he  took  into  partnership  in  1845,  and  who 
kept  on  the  business  of  the  firm  in  Springfield  till 
Lincoln's  death.  This  gentleman  was,  like  Boswell,  of 
opinion  that  a  great  man  is  not  best  portrayed  as  a 
figure  in  a  stained-glass  window.  He  had  lived  with 
Lincoln,  groaned  under  his  odd  ways,  and  loved  them, 
for  sixteen  years  before  his  Presidency,  and  after  his 
death  he  devoted  much  research,  in  his  own  memory 
and  those  of  many  others,  to  the  task  of  substituting 
for  Lincoln's  aureole  the  battered  tall  hat,  with  valuable 
papers  stuck  in  its  lining,  which  he  had  long  con 
templated  with  reverent  irritation.  Mr.  Herndon  was 
not  endowed  with  Boswell's  artistic  gift  for  putting  his 
materials  together,  perhaps  because  he  lacked  that 
delicacy  and  sureness  of  moral  perception  which  more 
than  redeemed  Boswell's  absurdities.  He  succeeded  on 
the  whole  in  his  aim,  for  the  figure  that  more  or  less 
distinctly  emerges  from  the  litter  of  his  workshop  is 
lovable  ;  but  in  spite  of  all  Lincoln's  melancholy,  the 
dreariness  of  his  life,  sitting  with  his  feet  on  the  table  in 
his  unswept  and  untidy  office  at  Illinois,  or  riding  on 
circuit  or  staying  at  ramshackle  western  inns  with 
the  Illinois  bar,  cannot  have  been  so  unrelieved  as  it 
is  in  Mr.  Herndon's  presentation.  And  Herndon  overdid 


102  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

his  part.  He  ferreted  out  petty  incidents  which,  he 
thought  might  display  the  acute  Lincoln  as  slightly  too 
acute,  when  for  all  that  can  be  seen  Lincoln  acted  just 
as  any  sensible  man  would  have  acted.  But  the  result 
is  that,  in  this  part  of  his  life  especially,  Lincoln's  way 
of  living  was  subjected  to  so  close  a  scrutiny  as  few  men 
have  undergone. 

Herndon's  scrutiny  does  not  reveal  the  current  of  his 
thoughts  either  on  life  generally  or  on  the  political 
problem  which  hereafter  was  to  absorb  him.  It  shows 
on  the  contrary,  and  the  recollections  of  his  Presidency 
confirm  it,  that  his  thought  on  any  important  topic 
though  it  might  flash  out  without  disguise  in  rare 
moments  of  intimacy,  usually  remained  long  unexpressed. 
His  great  sociability  had  perhaps  even  then  a  rather 
formidable  side  to  it.  He  was  not  merely  amusing 
himself  and  other  people,  when  he  chatted  and  ex 
changed  anecdotes  far  into  the  night  ;  there  was  an 
element,  not  ungenial,  of  purposeful  study  in  it  all.  He 
was  building  up  his  knowledge  of  ordinary  human  nature, 
his  insight  into  popular  feeling,  his  rather  slow  but  sure 
comprehension  of  the  individual  men  whom  he  did 
know.  It  astonished  the  self-improving  young  Herndon 
that  the  serious  books  he  read  were  few  and  that  he 
seldom  seemed  to  read  the  whole  of  them — though  with 
the  Bible,  Shakespeare,  and  to  a  less  extent  Burns,  he 
saturated  his  mind.  The  few  books  and  the  great  many 
men  were  part  of  one  study.  In  so  far  as  his  thought 
and  study  turned  upon  politics  it  seems  to  have  led 
him  soon  to  the  conclusion  that  he  had  for  the  present 
no  part  to  play  that  was  worth  playing.  By  1854,  as 
he  said  himself,  "  his  profession  as  a  lawyer  had  almost 
superseded  the  thought  of  politics  in  his  mind."  But  it 
does  not  seem  that  the  melancholy  sense  of  some  great 
purpose  unachieved  or  some  great  destiny  awaiting  him 
ever  quite  left  him.  He  must  have  felt  that  his  chance 
of  political  fame  was  in  all  appearance  gone,  and  would 
have  liked  to  win  himself  a  considerable  position  and 
a  little  (very  little)  money  as  a  lawyer  ;  but  the  study, 
in  the  broadest  sense,  of  which  these  years  were  full, 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT     103 

evidently  contemplated  a  larger  education  of  himself  as 
a  man  than  professional  keenness,  or  any  such  interest  - 
as  he  had  in  law,  will  explain.     Middle-aged  and  from  I 
his  own  point  of  view  a  failure,  he  was  set  upon  making :; 
himself  a  bigger  man.  -k 

In   some   respects   he   let   himself   be.     His   exterior     | 
oddities  never  seem  to  have  toned  down  much  ;    he     I 
could  not  be  taught  to  introduce  tidiness  or  method  into    £ 
his  office  ;   nor  did  he  make  himself  an  exact  lawyer  ;   a 
rough  and  ready  familiarity  with  practice  and  a  firm 
grasp  of  larger  principles  of  law  contented  him  without 
any  great  apparatus  of  learning.     His  method  of  study 
was  as  odd  as  anything  else  about  him  ;   he  could  read 
hard  and  commit  things  to  memory  in  the  midst  of 
bustle  and  noise  ;  on  the  other  hand,  since  reading  aloud 
was  his  chosen  way  of  impressing  what  he  read  on  his 
own  mind,  he  would  do  it  at  all  sorts  of  times  to  the 
sore  distraction  of  his  partner.     When  his  studies  are 
spoken    of,    observation    and    thought    on    some    plan 
concealed   in   his   own   mind   moist   be   taken   to   have 
formed   the   largest   element   in    these    studies.     There 
was,    however,    one    methodic   discipline,    highly    com 
mended  of  old  but  seldom  perhaps  seriously  pursued 
with  the  like  object  by  men  of  forty,  even  self-taught 
men,  which  he  did  pursue.     Some  time  during  these 
years  he  mastered  the  first  six  Books  of  Euclid.     It 
would  probably  be  no  mere  fancy  if  we  were  to  trace 
certain  definite  effects  of  this  discipline  upon  his  mind 
and  character.     The  faculty  which  he  had  before  shown 
of  reducing  his  thought  on  any  subject  to  the  simplest 
and  plainest  terms  possible,  now  grew  so  strong  that 
few  men  can  be  compared  with  him  in  this.     He  was 
gaining,    too,    from    some    source,    what    the    ancient 
geometers  would  themselves  have  claimed  as  partly  the 
product  of  their  study  ;  the  plain  fact  and  its  plain  con 
sequences,  were  not  only  clear  in  calm  hours  of  thought, 
but  remained  present  to  him,  felt  and  instinctive,  through 
seasons  of   confusion,  passion,    and    dismay.  (  His    life 
in  one  sense  was  very  full  of  companionship,  but  it  is 
probable  that  in  his  real  intellectual  interests  he  was 


104  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

lonely.)  To  Herndon,  intelligently  interested  in  many 
things/ his  master's  mind,  much  as  he  held  it  in  awe, 
seemed  chillingly  unpoetic — which  is  a  curious  view  of 
a  mind  steeped  in  Shakespeare  and  Burns.  The  two 
partners  had  been  separately  to  Niagara.  Herndon 
was  anxious  to  know  what  had  been  Lincoln's  chief  im 
pression,  and  was  pained  by  the  reply,  "  I  wondered 
where  all  that  water  came  from,"  which  he  felt  showed 
materialism  and  insensibility.  Lincoln's  thought  had, 
very  obviously,  a  sort  of  poetry  of  its  own,  but  of  a 
vast  and  rather  awful  kind.  He  had  occasionally 
written  verses  of  his  own  a  little  before  this  time  ;  sad 
verses  about  a  friend  who  had  become  a  lunatic, 
wondering  that  he  should  be  allowed  to  outlive  his  mind 
while  happy  young  lives  passed  away,  and  sad  verses 
about  a  visit  to  old  familiar  fields  in  Indiana,  where 
he  wandered  brooding,  as  he  says, 

"  Till  every  sound  appears  a  knell, 
And  every  spot  a  grave." 

They  are  not  great  poetry  ;    but  they  show  a  correct 
j  ear  for  verse,  and  they  are  not  the  verses  of  a  man  to 
1,  whom  any  of  the  familiar  forms  of  poetic  association 
were  unusual.  They__are  those  of  a  man   in  whom  the-, 
\  habitual  undercurrent  of  thought  was  melancholy,. 

Apart  from  these  signs  and  the  deep,  humorous  delight 
which  he  evidently  took  in  his  children,  there  may  be 
something  slightly  forbidding  in  this  figure  of  a  gaunt 
man,  disappointed  in  ambition  and  not  even  happy  at 
home,  rubbing  along  through  a  rather  rough  crowd,  with 
uniform  rough  geniality  and  perpetual  jest  ;  all  the  while 
/in  secret  forging  his  own  mind  into  an  instrument  for 
Lsome  vaguely  foreshadowed  end.  But  there  are  two  or 
three  facts  which  stand  out  certain  and  have  to  be  taken 
account  of  in  any  image  we  may  be  tempted  to  form  of 
him.  In  the  first  place,  his  was  no  forbidding  figure 
at  the  time  to  those  who  knew  him ;  a  queer  and  a  comic 
figure  evidently,  but  liked,  trusted,  and  by  some  loved ; 
reputed  for  honest  dealing  and  for  kindly  and  gentle 
dealing  ;  remarked  too  by  some  at  that  time,  as  before 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    105 

and  ever  after,  for  the  melancholy  of  his  face  in  repose  ; 
known  by  us  beyond  doubt  to  have  gone  through  great 
pain  ;  known  lastly  among  his  fellows  in  his  profession 
for  a  fire  of  anger  that  flashed  out  only  in  the  presence 
of  cruelty  and  wrong.  / 

His  law  practice,  which  he  pursued  with  energy, 
and  on  which  he  was  now,  it  seems,  prepared  to  look 
as  his  sole  business  in  life,  fitted  in  none  the  less  well 
with  his  deliberately  adopted  schemes  of  self-education. 
A  great  American  lawyer,  Mr.  Choate,  assures  us  that 
at  the  Illinois  bar  in  those  days  Lincoln  had  to  measure 
himself  against  very  considerable  men  in  suits  of  a 
class  that  required  some  intellect  and  training.  And  in 
his  own  way  he  held  his  own  among  these  men.  A 
layman  may  humbly  conjecture  that  the  combination 
in  one  person  of  the  advocate  and  the  solicitor  must 
give  opportunities  of  far  truer  intellectual  training  than 
the  mere  advocate  can  easily  enjoy.  The  Illinois 
advocate  was  not  all  the  time  pleading  the  cause  which 
he  was  employed  to  plead,  and  which  if  it  was  once 
offered  to  him  it  was  his  duty  to  accept  ;  he  was  the 
personal  adviser  of  the  client  whose  cause  he  pleaded, 
and  within  certain  limits  he  could  determine  whether  the 
cause  was  brought  at  all,  and  if  so  whether  he  should 
take  it  up  himself  or  leave  it  to  another  man.  The  rule 
in  such  matters  was  elastic  and  practice  varied.  Lin 
coln's  practice  went  to  the  very  limit  of  what  is  per 
missible  in  refusing  legal  aid  to  a  cause  he  disapproved. 
Coming  into  court  he  discovered  suddenly  some  fact 
about  his  case  which  was  new  to  him  but  which 
would  probably  not  have  justified  an  English  barrister 
in  throwing  up  his  brief.  The  case  was  called  ;  he  was 
absent  ;  the  judge  sent  to  his  hotel  and  got  back  a 
message  :  "  Tell  the  judge  I'm  washing  my  hands." 
One  client  received  advice  much  to  this  effect  :  "  I  can 
win  your  case  ;  I  can  get  you  $600.  I  can  also  make  an 
honest  family  miserable.  But  I  shall  not  take  your 
case,  and  I  shall  not  take  your  fee.  One  piece  of  advice 
I  will  give  you  gratis  :  Go  home  and  think  seriously 
whether  you  cannot  make  $600  in  some  honest  way." 


106  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

And  this  habit  of  mind  was  beyond  his  control.  Col 
leagues  whom  he  was  engaged  to  assist  in  cases, 
agreed  that  if  a  case  lost  his  sympathy  he  became 
helpless  and  useless  in  it.  This,  of  course,  was  not  the  ' 
way  to  make  money  ;  but  he  got  along  and  won  a 
considerable  local  position  at  the  bar,  for  his  perfect 
honesty  in  argument  and  in  statement  of  fact  was  known 
to  have  won  the  confidence  of  the  judges,  and  a  difficult 
case  which  he  thought  was  right  elicited  the  full  and 
curious  powers  of  his  mind.  His  invective  upon  occasion 
was  by  all  accounts  terrific.  An  advocate  glanced  at 
Lincoln's  notes  for  his  speech,  when  he  was  appearing 
against  a  very  heartless  swindler  and  saw  that  they 
concluded  with  the  ominous  words,  "  Skin  Defendant." 
The  vitriolic  outburst  which  occurred  at  the  point  thus 
indicated  seems  to  have  been  long  remembered  by  the 
Illinois  bar.  To  a  young  man  who  wished  to  be  a  lawyer 
yet  shrunk  from  the  profession  lest  it  should  necessarily 
involve  some  dishonesty  Lincoln  wrote  earnestly  and 
wisely,  showing  him  how  false  his  impression  of  the  law 
was,  but  concluding  with  earnest  entreaty  that  he  would 
not  enter  the  profession  if  he  still  had  any  fear  of  being 
led  by  it  to  become  a  knave. 

One  of  his  cases  is  interesting  for  its  own  sake,  not 
for  his  part  in  it.  He  defended  without  fee  the  son  of 
his  old  foe  and  friend  Jack  Armstrong,  and  of  Hannah, 
who  mended  his  breeches,  on  a  charge  of  murder.  Six 
witnesses  swore  that  they  had  seen  him  do  the  deed 
about  II  p.m.  on  such  and  such  a  night.  Cross- 
examined  :  They  saw  it  all  quite  clearly  ;  they  saw  it 
so  clearly  because  of  the  moonlight.  The  only  evidence 
for  the  defence  was  an  almanac.  There  had  been  no 
moon  that  night.  Another  case  is  interesting  for  his 
sake.  Two  young  men  set  up  in  a  farm  together,  bought 
a  waggon  and  team  from  a  poor  old  farmer,  Lincoln's 
client,  did  not  pay  him,  and  were  sued.  They  had  both 
been  just  under  twenty-one  when  they  contracted  the 
debt,  and  they  were  advised  to  plead  infancy.  A 
stranger  who  was  present  in  Court  described  afterwards 
his  own  indignation  as  the  rascally  tale  was  unfolded, 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    107 

and  his  greater  indignation  as  he  watched  the  locally 
famous  Mr.  Lincoln,  lying  back  in  his  seat,  nodding 
complacently  and  saying,  "  I  reckon  that's  so,"  as  each 
of  the  relevant   facts  was  produced,  and  the  relevant 
Statute  read  and  expounded.     At  last,  as  the  onlooker 
proceeded  to  relate,  the  time  came  for  Lincoln  to  address 
the  jury,  with  whom,  by  Illinois  law,  the  issue  still 
rested.     Slowly  he  disengaged  his  long,  lean  form  from 
his  seat,  and  before  he  had  got  it  drawn  out  to  its 
height  he  had  fixed  a  gaze  of  extraordinary  benevolence 
on  the  two  disgraceful  young  defendants  and  begun  in 
this  strain  :    "  Gentlemen  of  the  jury,  are  you  prepared 
that  these  two  young  men  shall  enter  upon  life  and  go 
through  life  with  the  stain  of  a  dishonourable  transaction 
for  ever  affixed  to  them,"  and  so  forth  at  just  sufficient 
length  and  with  just  enough  of  Shakespearean  padding 
about   honour.     The   result   with   that   emotional  and 
probably  irregular  Western  court  is  obvious,  and  the 
story  concludes  with  the  quite  credible  assertion  that  the 
defendants  themselves  were  relieved.     Any  good  jury 
would,  of  course,  have  been  steeled  against  the  appeal, 
which  might  have  been  expected,  to  their  compassion 
for  a  poor  and  honest  old  man.     A  kind  of  innocent  and 
benign  cunning  has  been  the  most  engaging  quality  in 
not  a  few  great  characters.     It  is  tempting,  though  at 
the  risk  of  undue  solemnity,  to  look  for  the  secret  of 
Lincoln's  cunning  in  this  instance.    We  know  from  copy 
books  and  other  sources  that  these  two  young  men, 
starting   on   the   down   grade   with    the   help   of   their 
blackguardly  legal  adviser,  were  objects  for  pity,  more 
so  than  the  man  who  was  about  to  lose  a  certain  number 
of  dollars.     Lincoln,  as  few  other  men  would  have  done, 
felt  a  certain  actual  regret  for  them  then  and  there  ; 
he  felt  it  so  naturally  that  he  knew  the  same  sympathy 
could  be  aroused,  at  least  in  twelve  honest  men  who 
already  wished   they  could   find   for  the   plaintiff.     It 
has  often  been  remarked  that  the  cause  of  his  later 
power  was  a  knowledge  of  the  people's  mind  which  was 
curiously  but  vitally  bound  up  with  his  own  rectitude. 
Any  attempt  that  we  may  make  to  analyse  a  subtle 


io8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 


ce 

pi 


character  and  in  some  respects  to  trace  its  growth  is 
certain  to  miss  the  exact  mark.  But  it  is  in  any  case 
plain  that  Abraham  Lincoln  left  political  life  in  1849, 
a  praiseworthy  self-made  man  with  good  sound  views 
but  with  nothing  much  to  distinguish  him  above  many 
other  such,  and  at  a  sudden  call  returned  to  political 
life  in  1854  with  a  touch  of  something  quite  uncommon 
added  to  those  good  sound  views. 

4.  The  Repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise. 

.^The  South  had  become  captive  to  politicians,  per 
sonally  reputable  and  of  some  executive  capacity,  who 
had  converted  its  natural  prejudice  into  a  definite 
doctrine  which  was  paradoxical  and  almost  inconceivably 
narrow,  and  who,  as  is  common  in  such  instances  of 
perversion  and  fanaticism,  knew  hardly  any  scruple  in 
the  practical  enforcement  of  their  doctrine.  In  the 
North,  on  the  other  hand,  though  there  were  some  few 
politicians  who  were  clever  and  well-intentioned,  public 
opinion  had  no  very  definite  character,  and  public  men 
generally  speaking  were  flabby.  At  such  a  time  the 
sheer  adventurer  has  an  excellent  field  before  him  and 
perhaps  has  his  appointed  use./ 

Stephen  Douglas,  who  was'  four  years  younger  than 
Lincoln,  had  come  to  Illinois  from  the  Eastern  States 
just  about  the  time  when  Lincoln  entered  the  Legislature. 
He  had  neither  money  nor  friends  to  start  with,  but 
almost  immediately  secured,  by  his  extraordinary  address 
in  pushing  himself,  a  clerkship  in  the  Assembly.  He  soon 
became,  like  Lincoln,  a  lawyer  and  a  legislator,  but  was 
on  the  Democratic  side.  He  rapidly  soared  into  regions 
beyond  the  reach  of  Lincoln,  and  in  1847  became  a 
Senator  for  Illinois,  where  he  later  became  Chairman  of 
the  Committee  on  Territories,  and  as  such  had  to  con 
sider  the  question  of  providing  for  the  government  of  the 
districts  called  Kansas  and  Nebraska,  which  lay  west 
and  north-west  of  Missouri,  and  from  which  slavery  was 
excluded  by  the  Missouri  Compromise.  He  was  what  in 
England  is  called  a  "  Jingo,"  and  was  at  one  time  eager 
to  fight  this  country  for  the  possession  of  what  is  now 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    109 

British  Columbia.  His  short  figure  gave  an  impression 
of  abounding  strength  and  energy  which  obtained  him 
the  nickname  of  "  the  little  Giant."  With  no  assignable 
higher  quality,  and  with  the  blustering,  declamatory, 
shamelessly  fallacious  and  evasive  oratory  of  a  common 
demagogue,  he  was  nevertheless  an  accomplished  Par 
liamentarian,  and  imposed  himself  as  effectively  upon 
the  Senate  as  he  did  upon  the  people  of  Illinois  and  the 
North  generally.  He  was,  no  doubt,  a  remarkable  man, 
with  the  gift  of  attracting  many  people.  A  political 
opponent  has  described  vividly  how  at  first  sight  he  was 
instantly  repelled  by  the  sinister  and  dangerous  air  of 
Douglas'  scowl ;  a  still  stronger  opponent,Jmt_a  woman, 
Mrs.  Beecher  Stowe,  seems  on  the  contrary  to  have  found 
it  impossible  to  hate  him.  What  he  now  did  displayed 
at  any  rate  a  sporting  quality. 

In  the  course  of  1854  Stephen  Douglas  while  in 
charge  of  an  inoffensive  Bill  dealing  with  the  government 
of  Kansas  and  Nebraska  converted  it  into  a  form  in 
which  it  empowered  the  people  of  Kansas  at  any  time 
to  decide  for  themselves  whether  they  would  permit 
slavery  or  not,  and  in  express  terms  repealed  the 
Missouri  Compromise.  With  the  easy  connivance  of 
President  Pierce  and  the  enthusiastic  support  of  the 
Southerners,  and  by  some  extraordinary  exercise  of  his 
art  as  demagogue  and  Parliamentarian,  he  triumphantly 
ran  this  measure  through. 

Just  how  it  came  about  seems  to  be  rather  obscure, 
but  it  is  easy  to  conjecture  his  motives.  Trained  in  a 
school  in  which  scruple  or  principle  were  unknown  and 

I  the  man  who  arrives  is  the  great  man,  Douglas,  like  other 
such  adventurers  was  accessible  to  visions  of  a  sort. 
He  cared  nothing  whether  negroes  were  slaves  or  not, 

I  and  doubtless  despised  Northern  and  Southern  sentiment 
on  that  subject  equally  ;  as  he  frankly  said  once,  on 
any  question  between  white  men  and  negroes  he  was  on 
the  side  of  the  white  men,  and  on  any  question  between 
negroes  and  crocodiles  he  would  be  on  the  side  of  the 
negroes.  But  he  did  care  for  the  development  of  the 
great  national  heritage  in  the  West,  that  subject  of  an 


i  io  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

easy  but  perfectly  wholesome  patriotic  pride  with,  which 
we  are  familiar.  It  must  have  been  a  satisfaction  to  him 
to  feel  that  North  and  South  would  now  have  an  equal 
chance  in  that  heritage,  and  also  that  the  white  settlers 
in  the  West  would  be  relieved  of  any  restriction  on  their 
freedom.  None  the  less  his  action  was  to  the  last 
degree  reckless.  The  North  had  shown  itself  ready  in 
1850  to  put  up  with  a  great  deal  of  quiet  invasion  of 
its  former  principle,  but  to  lay  hands  upon  the  sacred 
letter  of  the  Act  in  which  that  principle  was  enshrined, 
was  to  invite  exciting  consequences.  / 

The  immediate  consequences  were  two-fold.  In  the 
first  place  Southern  settlers  came  pouring  into  Kansas 
and  Northern  settlers  in  still  larger  numbers  (rendered 
larger  still  by  the  help  of  an  emigration  society  formed 
in  the  North-East  for  that  purpose)  came  pouring  in  too. 
It  was  at  first  a  race  to  win  Kansas  for  slavery  or  for 
freedom.  When  it  became  apparent  that  freedom  was 
winning  easily,  the  race  turned  into  a  civil  war  between 
these  two  classes  of  immigrants  for  the  possession  of  the 
Territorial  government,  and  this  kept  on  its  scandalous 
and  bloody  course  for  three  or  four  years. 

In  the  second  place  there  was  a  revolution  in  the  party 

system.     The    old   Whig    party,    which,   whatever    its 

tendencies,  had  avoided  having  any  principle  in  regard 

to    slavery,    now    abruptly    and    opportunely    expired. 

There  had  been  an  attempt  once  before,  and  that  time 

mainly  among  Democrats,  to  create  a  new  "  Free-soil 

Party,"  but  it  had  come  to  very  little.       This  time  a 

permanent  fusion  was  accomplished  between  the  majority 

of  the  former  Whigs  in  the   North    and  a  numerous 

secession  from  among  the  Northern  Democrats.     They 

%  created  the  great  Republican  party,  of  which  the  name 

land   organisation  has   continued   to   this   day,   but   of 

•which  the  original  principle  was  simply  and  solely  that 

•there  should  be  no  further  extension  of  slavery  upon 

"territory  present  or  future  of  the  United   States.     It 

naturally  consisted  of    Northerners  only.     This  was  of 

course  an  ominous  fact,  and  caused  people,  who  were  too 

timid  either  to  join  the  Republicans  or  turn  Democrat, 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT     1 1 1 

to  take  refuge  in  another  strange  party,  formed  about 
this  time,  which  had  no  views  about  slavery.  This  was 
the  "  American  "  party,  commonly  called  the  "  Know- 
Nothing  "  party  from  its  ridiculous  and  objectionable 
secret  organisation.  Its  principle  was  dislike  of  foreign 
immigrants,  especially  such  as  were  Roman  Catholics. 
To  them  Ex-President  Fillmore,  protesting  against 
"  the  madness  of  the  times  "  when  men  ventured  to  say 
yes  or  no  on  a  question  relating  to  slavery,  fled  for  com 
fort,  and  became  their  candidate  for  the  Presidency  at 
the  next  election. 

It  was  in  1854  that  Lincoln  returned  to  political  life 
as  one  of  the  founders  of  the  Republican  party.  But  it 
will  be  better  at  once  to  deal  with  one  or  two  later 
events  with  which  he  was  not  specially  concerned.  The 
Republicans  chose  as  their  Presidential  candidate  in 
1 856  an  attractive  figure,  John  Fremont,  a  Southerner  of 
French  origin,  who  had  conducted  daring  and  successful 
explorations  in  Oregon,  had  some  hand  (perhaps  a  very 
important  hand)  in  conquering  California  from  Mexico, 
and  played  a  prominent  part  in  securing  California  for 
freedom.  The  Southern  Democrats  again  secured  a 
Northern  instrument  in  James  Buchanan  of  Pennsyl 
vania,  an  elderly  and  very  respectable  man,  who  was 
understood  to  be  well  versed  in  diplomatic  and  official 
life.  He  was  a  more  memorable  personage  than  Pierce. 
A  great  chorus  of  friendly  witnesses  to  his  character 
has  united  in  ascribing  all  his  actions  to  weakness. 

Buchanan  was  elected ;  but  for  a  brand  new  party 
the  Republicans  had  put  up  a  very  good  fight,  and  they 
were  in  the  highest  of  spirits  when,  shortly  after 
Buchanan's  Inauguration  in  1857,  a  staggering  blow  fell 
upon  them  from  an  unexpected  quarter.  This  was 
nothing  less  than  a  pronouncement  by  the  Chief  Justice 
and  a  majority  of  Justices  in  the  Supreme  Court  of  the 
United  States,  that  the  exclusion  of  slavery  from  any 
portion  of  the  Territories,  and  therefore,  of  course,  the 
whole  aim  and  object  of  the  Republicans,  was,  as  Calhoun 
had  contended  eight  or  ten  years  before,  unconstitutional. 

Dred  Scott  was  a  negro  slave  whose  misfortunes  it  is 


ii2  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

needless  to  compassionate,  since,  after  giving  his  name 
to  one  of  the  most  famous  law  cases  in  history,  he  was 
emancipated  with  his  family  by  a  new  master  into  whose 
hands  he  had  passed.  Some  time  before  the  Missouri 
Compromise  was  repealed  he  had  been  taken  by  his 
master  into  Nebraska,  as  a  result  of  which  he  claimed 
that  he  became,  by  virtue  of  the  Missouri  Compromise, 
a  free  man.  His  right  to  sue  his  master  in  a  Federal 
Court  rested  on  the  allegation  that  he  was  now  a 
citizen  of  Missouri,  while  his  master  was  a  citizen  of 
another  State.  There  was  thus  a  preliminary  question 
to  be  decided :  was  he  really  a  citizen,  before  the  question, 
was  he  a  freeman,  could  arise  at  all  ?  If  the  Supreme 
Court  followed  its  established  practice,  and  if  it  decided 
against  his  citizenship,  it  would  not  consider  the  question 
which  interested  the  public,  that  of  his  freedom. 

Chief  Justice  Roger  Taney  may  be  seen  from  the  refined 
features  of  his  portrait  and  the  clear-cut  literary  style  of 
his  famous  judgment,  to  have  been  a  remarkable  man. 
He  was  now  eighty-three,  but  in  unimpaired  intellectual 
vigour.  In  a  judgment,  with  which  five  of  his  colleagues 
entirely  concurred  and  from  which  only  two  dissented, 
he  decided  that  Dred  Scott  was  not  a  citizen,  and  went 
on,  contrary  to  practice,  to  pronounce,  in  what  was 
probably  to  be  considered  as  a  mere  obiter  dictum, 
that  Dred  Scott  was  not  free,  because  the  Missouri 
Compromise  had  all  along  been  unconstitutional  and 
void.  Justices  McLean  and  Curtis,  especially  the  latter, 
answered  Taney's  arguments  in  cogent  judgments, 
which  it  seems  generally  to  be  thought  were  right. 
Many  lawyers  thought  so  then,  and  so  did  the  prudent 
Fillmore.  This  is  one  of  the  rare  cases  where  a  layman 
may  have  an  opinion  on  a  point  of  law,  for  the  argument 
of  Taney  was  entirely  historical  and  rested  upon  the 
opinion  as  to  negroes  and  slavery  which  he  ascribed  to 
the  makers  of  the  Constitution  and  the  authors  of  the 
Declaration  of  Independence.  On  the  question  of 
Scott's  citizenship  he  laid  down  that  these  men  had 
hardly  counted  Africans  as  human  at  all,  and  used  words 
such  as  "  men,"  "  persons,"  "  citizens "  in  a  sense 


LINCOLN  IN  CONGRESS  AND  RETIREMENT    113 

which  necessarily  excluded  the  negro.  We  have  seen 
already  that  he  was  wrong — the  Southern  politician  who 
called  the  words  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence 
"  a  self-evident  lie  "  was  a  sounder  historian  than 
Taney ;  but  an  amazing  fact  is  to  be  added  :  the 
Constitution,  whose  authors,  according  to  Taney,  could 
not  conceive  of  a  negro  as  a  citizen,  was  actually  the 
act  of  a  number  of  States  in  several  of  which  negroes 
were  exercising  the  full  rights  of  citizens  at  the  time. 
It  would  be  easy  to  bring  almost  equally  plain  con 
siderations  to  bear  against  the  more  elaborate  argument 
of  Taney  that  the  Missouri  Compromise  was  uncon 
stitutional,  but  it  is  enough  to  say  this  much  :  the  first 
four  Presidents — that  is,  all  the  Presidents  who  were  in 
public  life  when  the  Constitution  was  made — had  all 
acted  unhesitatingly  upon  the  belief  that  Congress  had 
the  power  to  allow  or  forbid  slavery  in  the  Territories. 
The  fifth,  John  Quincy  Adams,  when  he  set  his  hand 
to  Acts  involving  this  principle,  had  consulted  before 
doing  so  the  whole  of  his  Cabinet  on  this  constitutional 
point  and  had  signed  such  legislation  with  the  full 
concurrence  of  them  all,  including  Calhoun.  Even 
Polk  had  acted  later  upon  the  same  view.  The  Dred^ 
Scott  judgment  would  thus  appear  to  show  the  penei1 
trating  power  at  that  time  of  an  altogether  jfantastie 
opinion. 

The  hope,  which  Taney  is  known  to  have  entertained, 
that  his  judgment  would  compose  excited  public  opinion, 
was  by  no  means  fulfilled.  It  raised  fierce  excitement. 
What  practical  effect  would  hereafter  be  given  to  the 
opinion  of  six  out  of  the  nine  judges  in  that  Court  might 
depend  on  many  things.  But  to  the  Republicans,  who 
appealed  much  to  antiquity,  it  was  maddening  to  be 
thus  assured  that  their  whole  "  platform  "  was  un 
constitutional.  In  the  long  run,  there  seems  to  be  no 
doubt  that  Taney  helped  the  cause  of  freedom.  He  had 
tried  to  make  evident  the  personal  sense  of  compassion 
for  "  these  unfortunate  people  "  with  which  he  con 
templated  the  opinion  that  he  ascribed  to  a  past  genera 
tion  ;  but  he  failed  to  do  this,  and  instead  he  succeeded 


1 14  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

in  imparting  to  the  supposed  Constitutional  view  of  the 
slave,  as  nothing  but  a  chattel,  a  horror  which  went 
home  to  many  thousands  of  the  warm-hearted  men  and 
women  of  his  country. 

For  the  time,  however,  the  Republicans  were  deeply 
depressed,  and  a  further  perplexity  shortly  befell  them. 
An  attempt,  to  which  we  must  shortly  return,  was  made 
to  impose  the  slave  system  on  Kansas  against  the  now 
unmistakable  will  of  the  majority  there.  Against  this 
attempt  Douglas,  in  opposition  to  whom  the  Republican 
party  had  been  formed,  revolted  to  his  lasting  honour, 
and  he  now  stood  out  for  the  occasion  as  the  champion 
of  freedom.  It  was  at  this  late  period  of  bewilderment 
and  confusion  that  the  life-story  of  Abraham  Lincoln 
became  one  with  the  life-story  of  the  American  people. 


CHAPTER    V 

THE    RISE    OF    LINCOLN 

I.  Lincoln's  Return  to  Public  Life. 

WE  possess  a  single  familiar  letter  in  which  Lincoln 
opened  his  heart  about  politics.  It  was  written  while 
old  political  ties  were  not  yet  quite  broken  and  new  ties 
not  quite  knit,  and  it  was  written  to  an  old  and  a  dear 
friend  who  was  not  his  political  associate.  We  may 
fittingly  place  it  here,  as  a  record  of  the  strong  and 
conflicting  feelings  out  of  which  his  consistent  purpose 
in  this  crisis  was  formed. 

"24  August,  1855. 

"To  JOSHUA  SPEED. 

"  You  know  what  a  poor  correspondent  I  am.  Ever 
since  I  received  your  very  agreeable  letter  of  the  2 2nd 
I  have  been  intending  to  write  you  an  answer  to  it, 
You  suggest  that  in  political  action,  now,  you  and  1 
would  differ.  I  suppose  we  would  ;  not  quite  so  much, 
however,  as  you  may  think.  You  know  I  dislike  slavery, 
and  you  fully  admit  the  abstract  wrong  of  it.  So  far 
there  is  no  cause  of  difference.  But  you  say  that 
sooner  than  yield  your  legal  right  to  the  slave,  especially 
at  the  bidding  of  those  who  are  not  themselves  interested, 
you  would  see  the  Union  dissolved.  I  am  not  aware  that 
any  one  is  bidding  you  yield  that  right  ;  very  certainly 
I  am  not.  I  leave  that  matter  entirely  to  yourself. 
I  also  acknowledge  your  rights  and  my  obligations 
under  the  Constitution  in  regard  to  your  slaves.  I 
confess  I  hate  to  see  the  poor  creatures  hunted  down 
and  caught  and  carried  back  to  their  stripes  and  un 
requited  toil ;  but  I  bite  my  lips  and  keep  quiet.  In 
1841  you  and  I  had  together  a  tedious  low-water  trip  on 
a  steamboat  from  Louisville  to  St.  Louis.  You  may 
remember,  as  I  well  do,  that  from  Louisville  to  the  mouth 


ii6  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

of  the  Ohio  there  were  on  board  ten  or  a  dozen  slaves 
shackled  together  with  irons.  That  sight  was  a  con 
tinual  torment  to  me,  and  I  see  something  like  it  every 
time  I  touch  the  Ohio  or  any  other  slave  border.  It 
is  not  fair  for  you  to  assume  that  I  have  no  interest  in 
a  thing  which  has,  and  continually  exercises,  the  power 
to  make  me  miserable.  You  ought  rather  to  appreciate 
how  much  the  great  body  of  the  Northern  people  do 
crucify  their  feelings,  in  order  to  maintain  their  loyalty 
to  the  Constitution  and  the  Union.  I  do  oppose  the 
extension  of  slavery  because  my  judgment  and  feelings 
so  prompt  me,  and  I  am  under  no  obligations  to  the 
contrary.  If  for  this  you  and  I  must  differ,  differ  we 
must.  .  .  . 

"  You  say  that  if  Kansas  fairly  votes  herself  a  free 
State,  as  a  Christian  you  will  rejoice  at  it.  All  decent 
slave  holders  talk  that  way  and  I  do  not  doubt  their 
candour.  But  they  never  vote  that  way.  Although 
in  a  private  letter  or  conversation  you  will  express  your 
preference  that  Kansas  shall  be  free,  you  will  vote  for 
no  man  for  Congress  who  would  say  the  same  thing 
publicly.  No  such  man  could  be  elected  from  any 
district  in  a  slave  State.  .  .  .  The  slave  breeders  and 
slave  traders  are  a  small,  odious  and  detested  class 
among  you  ;  and  yet  in  politics  they  dictate  the  course 
of  all  of  you,  and  are  as  completely  your  masters  as  you 
are  the  masters  of  your  own  negroes. 

"  You  inquire  where  I  now  stand.  That  is  a  disputed 
point.  I  think  I  am  a  Whig  ;  but  others  say  there  are 
no  Whigs,  and  that  I  am  an  Abolitionist.  When  I  was 
at  Washington  I  voted  for  the  Wilmot  Proviso  as  good 
as  forty  times  ;  and  I  never  heard  of  any  one  attempting 
to  un-Whig  me  for  that.  I  now  do  no  more  than  oppose 
the  extension  of  slavery.  I  am  not  a  Know-Nothing, 
that  is  certain.  How  could  I  be  ?  How  can  any  one 
who  abhors  the  oppression  of  negroes  be  in  favour  of 
degrading  classes  of  white  people  ?  Our  progress  in 
degeneracy  appears  to  me  pretty  rapid.  As  a  nation 
we  began  by  declaring  that  '  all  men  are  created  equal.' 
We  now  practically  read  it,  '  all  men  are  created  equal, 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  117 

except  negroes.'  When  the  Know-Nothings  get  con 
trol,  it  will  read,  '  all  men  are  created  equal,  except 
negroes  and  foreigners  and  Catholics.'  When  it  comes 
to  this,  I  shall  prefer  emigrating  to  some  country  where 
they  make  no  pretence  of  loving  liberty — to  Russia,  for 
instance,  where  despotism  can  be  taken  pure,  and 
without  the  base  alloy  of  hypocrisy. 

"  Mary  will  probably  pass  a  day  or  two  in  Louisville  in 
October.     My  kindest  regards  to  Mrs.  Speed.     On  the 
leading  subject  of  this  letter  I  have  more  of  her  sympathy 
than  I  have  of  yours  ;  and  yet  let  me  say  I  am 
"  Your  friend  forever, 

"  A.  LINCOLN." 

The  shade  of  doubt  which  this  letter  suggests  related 
really  to  the  composition  of  political  parties  and  the 
grouping  of  political  forces,  not  in  the  least  to  the 
principles  by  which  Lincoln's  own  actions  would  be 
guided.  He  has  himself  recorded  that  the  repeal  of  the 
Missouri  Compromise  meant  for  him  the  sudden  revival 
in  a  far  stronger  form  of  his  interest  in  politics,  and, 
we  may  add,  of  his  political  ambition.  The  opinions 
which  he  cherished  most  deeply  demanded  no  longer 
patience  but  vehement  action.  The  faculties  of  political 
organisation  and  of  popular  debate,  of  which  he  enjoyed 
the  exercise,  could  now  be  used  for  a  purpose  which 
satisfied  his  understanding  and  his  heart. 

From  1854  onwards  we  find  Lincoln  almost  incessantly 
occupied,  at  conventions,  at  public  meetings,  in  corre 
spondence,  in  secret  consultation  with  those  who  looked 
to  him  for  counsel,  for  the  one  object  of  strengthening  the 
new  Republican  movement  in  his  own  State  of  Illinois, 
and,  so  far  as  opportunity  offered,  in  the  neighbouring 
States.  Some  of  the  best  of  his  reported  and  the  most 
effective  of  his  unreported  speeches  were  delivered 
between  1854  and  1858.  Yet  as  large  a  part  of  his 
work  in  these  years  was  done  quietly  in  the  back 
ground,  and  it  continued  to  be  his  fate  to  be  called 
upon  to  efface  himself. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  follow  in  any  detail  the  labours 
by  which  he  became  a  great  leader  in  Illinois.  It  may 


ii8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

suffice  to  pick  out  two  instances  that  illustrate  the  ways 
of  this  astute,  unselfish  man.  The  first  is  very  trifling 
and  shows  him  merely  astute.  A  Springfield  newspaper 
called  the  Conservative  was  acquiring  too  much  in 
fluence  as  the  organ  of  moderate  and  decent  opinion 
that  acquiesced  in  the  extension  of  negro  slavery.  The 
Abolitionist,  Mr.  Herndon,  was  a  friend  of  the  editor. 
One  day  he  showed  Lincoln  an  article  in  a  Southern 
paper  which  most  boldly  justified  slavery  whether  the 
slaves  were  black  or  white.  Lincoln  observed  what  a 
good  thing  it  would  be  if  the  pro-slavery  papers  of 
Illinois  could  be  led  to  go  this  length.  Herndon 
ingeniously  used  his  acquaintance  with  the  editor  to 
procure  that  he  should  reprint  this  article  with  approval. 
Of  course  that  promising  journalistic  venture,  the 
Conservative,  was  at  once  ruined  by  so  gross  an 
indiscretion.  This  was  hard  on  its  confiding  editor, 
and  it  is  not  to  Lincoln's  credit  that  he  suggested  or 
connived  at  this  trick.  But  this  trumpery  tale  happens 
to  be  a  fair  illustration  of  two  things.  In  the  first 
place  a  large  part  of  Lincoln's  activity  went  in  the 
industrious  and  watchful  performance  of  services  to 
his  cause,  very  seldom  as  questionable  but  constantly 
as  minute  as  this,  and  in  making  himself  as  in  this 
case  confidant  and  adviser  to  a  number  of  less  notable 
workers.  In  the  second  place  a  biographer  must  set 
forth  if  he  can  the  materials  for  the  severest  judgment 
on  his  subject,  and  in  the  case  of  a  man  whose  fame 
was  built  on  his  honesty,  but  who  certainly  had  an 
aptitude  for  ingenious  tricks  and  took  a  humorous 
delight  in  them,  this  duty  might  involve  a  tedious 
examination  of  many  unimportant  incidents.  It  may 
save  such  discussion  hereafter  to  say,  as  can  safely  be 
said  upon  a  study  of  all  the  transactions  in  his  life  of 
which  the  circumstances  are  known,  that  this  trick  on 
the  editor  of  the  Conservative  marks  the  limit  of 
Lincoln's  deviation  from  the  straight  path.  Most  of  us 
might  be  very  glad  if  we  had  really  never  done  anything 
much  more  dishonest. 

Our  second  tale  of  this  period  is  much  more  memorable. 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  119 

In  1856  the  term  of  office  of  one  of  the  Senators  for 
Illinois  came  to  an  end ;  and  there  was  a  chance  of 
electing  an  opponent  of  Douglas.  Those  of  the  Repub 
licans  of  Illinois  who  were  former  Whigs  desired  the 
election  of  Lincoln,  but  could  only  secure  it  by  the 
adhesion  of  a  sufficient  number  of  former  Democrats  and 
waverers.  United  States  Senators  are  elected  by  the 
Legislatures  of  their  own  States  through  a  procedure 
similar  to  that  of  the  Conclave  of  Cardinals  which  elects 
a  Pope  ;  if  there  are  several  candidates  and  no  one  of 
them  has  an  absolute  majority  of  the  votes  first  cast,  the 
candidate  with  most  votes  is  not  elected  ;  the  voting  is 
repeated,  perhaps  many  times,  till  some  one  has  an 
absolute  majority  ;  the  final  result  is  brought  about  by 
a  transfer  of  votes  from  one  candidate  to  another  in  which 
the  prompt  and  cunning  wire-puller  has  sometimes  a 
magnificent  opportunity  for  his  skill.  In  this  particular 
contest  there  were  many  ballots,  and  Lincoln  at  first 
led.  His  supporters  werp  full  of  eager  hope.  Lincoln, 
looking  on,  discerned  before  any  of  them  the  setting  in 
of  an  under-current  likely  to  result  in  the  election  of  a 
supporter  of  Douglas.  He  discerned,  too,  that  the  surest 
way  to  prevent  this  was  for  the  whole  of  his  friends 
immediately  to  go  over  to  the  Democrat,  Lynam 
Trumbull,  who  was  a.  sound  opponent  of  slavery.  He 
sacrificed  his  own  chance  instantly  by  persuading  his 
supporters  to  do  thig.  They  were  very  reluctant,  but 
he  overbore  them  ;  one,  a  very  old  friend,  records  that 
he  never  saw  him  more  earnest  and  decided.  The 
same  friend  records,  what  is  necessary  to  the  appreciation 
of  Lincoln's  conduct,  that  his  personal  disappointment 
and  mortification  at  his  failure  was  great.  Lincoln,  it 
will  be  remembered,  had  acted  just  in  this  way  when 
he  sought  election  to  the  House  of  Representatives  ;  he 
was  to  repeat  this  line  of  conduct  in  a  manner  at  least 
as  striking  in  the  following  year.  Minute  criticism  of 
his  action  in  many  njiatters  becomes  pointless  when  we 
observe  that  his  managing  shrewdness  was  never  more 
signally  displayed  than  it  was  three  times  over  in  the 
sacrifice  of  his  own  personal  chances. 


120  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

For  four  years,  it  is  to  be  remembered,  the  activity  and 
influence  of  which  we  are  speaking  were  of  little  import 
ance  beyond  the  boundaries  of  Illinois.  It  is  true  that 
at  the  Republican  Convention  in  1856  which  chose 
Fremont  as  its  candidate  for  the  Presidency,  Lincoln  was 
exposed  for  a  moment  to  the  risk  (for  so  it  was  to  be 
regarded)  of  being  nominated  for  the  Vice-Presidency  ; 
but  even  his  greatest  speech  was  not  noticed  outside 
Illinois,  and  in  the  greater  part  of  the  Northern  States 
his  name  was  known  to  comparatively  few  and  to  them 
only  as  a  local  notability  of  the  West.  But  in  the  course 
of  1858  he  challenged  the  attention  of  the  whole  country. 
There  was  again  a  vacancy  for  a  Senator  for  Illinois. 
Douglas  was  the  sole  and  obvious  candidate  of  the 
Democrats.  Lincoln  came  forward  as  his  opponent. 
The  elections  then  pending  of  the  State  Legislature, 
which  in  its  turn  would  elect  a  Senator,  became  a  contest 
between  Lincoln  and  Douglas,  In  the  autumn  of  that 
year  these  rival  champions  held  seven  joint  debates 
before  mass  meetings  in  the  open  air  at  important  towns 
of  Illinois,  taking  turns  in  the  right  of  opening  the  debate 
and  replying  at  its  close  ;  in  addition  each  was  speaking 
at  meetings  of  his  own  at  leas>;  once  a  day  for  three 
months.  At  the  end  of  it  all  Douglas  had  won  his  seat 
in  the  Senate,  and  Lincoln  had  not  yet  gained  recognition 
among  the  Republican  leaders  a,s  one  of  themselves. 
Nevertheless  the  contest  between  Lincoln  and  Douglas 
was  one  of  the  decisive  events  in  American  history, 
partly  from  the  mere  fact  that  at  that  particular 
moment  any  one  opposed  Douglas  at  all ;  partly  from  the 
manner  in  which,  in  the  hearing  of,  all  America,  Lincoln 
formulated  the  issue  between  them  ;  partly  from  the 
singular  stroke  by  which  he  deliberately  ensured  his 
own  defeat  and  certain  further  consequences. 

2.  The  Principles  and  the  Oratory  of  Lincoln. 

We  can  best  understand  the  causes  which  suddenly 
made  him  a  man  of  national  consequence  by  a  somewhat  I 
close  examination  of  the  principles  and  the  spirit  which  1 
governed  all  his  public  activity  from  the  moment  of  the   » 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  121 

repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise.  The  new  Republican 
party  which  then  began  to  form  itself  stood  for  what 
might  seem  a  simple  creed  ;  slavery  must  be  tolerated 
where  it  existed  because  the  Constitution  and  the 
maintenance  of  the  Union  required  it,  but  it  must  not 
be  allowed  to  extend  beyond  its  present  limits  because 
it  was  fundamentally  wrong.  This  was  what  most 
Whigs  and  many  Democrats  in  the  North  had  always 
held,  but  the  formulation  of  it  as  the  platform  of  a 
party,  and  a  party  which  must  draw  its  members  almost 
entirely  from  the  North,  was  bound  to  raise  in  an  acute 
form  questions  on  which  very  few  men  had  searched  their 
hearts.  Men  who  hated  slavery  were  likely  to  falter 
and  find  excuses  for  yielding  when  confronted  with  the 
danger  to  the  Union  which  would  arise.  Men  who 
loved  the  Union  might  in  the  last  resort  be  ready  to 
sacrifice  it  if  they  could  thereby  be  rid  of  complicity 
with  slavery,  or  might  be  unwilling  to  maintain  it  at  the 
cost  of  fratricidal  war.  The  stress  of  conflicting  emotions 
and  the  complications  of  the  political  situation  were 
certain  to  try  to  the  uttermost  the  faith  of  any  Re 
publican  who  was  not  very  sure  just  how  much  he 
cared  for  the  Union  and  how  much  for  freedom,  and 
what  loyalty  to  either  principle  involved.  It  was  the\ 
distinction  of  Lincoln — a  man  lacking  in  much  of  the\ 
knowledge  which  statesmen  are  supposed  to  possess,  and 
capable  of  blundering  and  hesitation  about  details — first, 
that  upon  questions  like  these  he  was  free  from  ambiguity 
of  thought  or  faltering  of  will,  and  further,  that  upon  his  . 
difficult  path,  amid  bewildering  and  terrifying  circum 
stances,  he  was  able  to  take  with  him  the  minds  of  very 
many  very  ordinary  men. 

In   a   slightly   conventional  memorial  oration   upon 

Clay,   Lincoln   had   said   of  him   that   "  he lQY£d__his 

country,  ^partly  because  it  was  his  own  country,  and 
mostly  because  it  was  a  free  country.."  He  might  truly 
have  said  the  like  of  himself.  To  him  the  national 
jinity  of  America,  with  the  Constitution  which  sym 
bolised  it,  was  the  subject  of  pride  and  of  devotion  just 
in  so  far  as  it  had  embodied  and  could  hereafter  more 


122  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

fully    embody   certain  principles    of  permanent   value 
to_mankirid,     On  this  he  fully  knew    his    own   inner 
mind.     For  the  preservation  of  an  America  which  he 
could  value  more,  say,  than  men  value  the  Argentine 
Republic,  he  was  to  show  himself  better  prepared  than 
any   other   man   to   pay  any  possible   price.     But   he  \ 
definitely  refused  to  preserve  the  Union  by  what  in  his 
estimation  would  have  been  the  real  surrender  of  the  J 
principles  which  had  made  Americans  a  distinct  ancy 
self-respecting  nation. 

Those  principles  he  found  in  the  Declaration  of 
Independence.  Its  rhetorical  inexactitude  gave  him  no 
trouble,  and  must  not,  now  that  its  language  is  out  of 
fashion,  blind  us  to  the  fact  that  the  founders  of  the 
United  States  did  deliberately  aspire  to  found  a  common 
wealth  in  which  common  men  and  women  should  count 
^for  more  .than  elsewhere,  and  in  which,  as  we  might  now 
phrase  it,  ?11  ant'hnr.ity  must  defer  somewhat  to  the 
interests  and  to  the  sentiments  of  the  under  dog. 
"  Public  opinion  on  any  subject,"  he  said,  "  always  has 
a  '  central  idea  '  from  which  all  its  minor  thoughts 
radiate.  The  c  central  idea  '  in  our  public  opinion  at 
the  beginning  was,  and  till  recently  has  continued  to 
be, c  thi  equality  of  man  '  ;  and,  although  it  has  always 
submitted  patiently  to  whatever  inequality  seemed  to  be 
a  matter  of  actual  necessity,  its  constant  working  has 
been  a  steady  and  progressive  effort  towards  the 
practical  equality  of  all  men."  The  fathers,  he  said 
again,  had  never  intended  any  such  obvious  untruth 
as  that  equality  actually  existed,  or  that  any  action 
of  theirs  could  immediately  create  it  ;  but  they  had  set 
up  a  standard  to  which  continual  approximation  could 
be  made. 

So  far  as  white  men  were  concerned  such  approxi 
mation  had  actually  taken  place  ;  the  audiences 
Lincoln  addressed  were  fully  conscious  that  very  many 
thousands  had  found  in  the  United  States  a  scope  to 
lead  their  own  lives  which  the  traditions  and  in 
stitutions  no  less  than  the  physical  conditions  of  their 
former  countries  had  denied  them.  There  was  no  need 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  123 

for  him  to  enlarge  on  this  fact ;  but  there  are  repeated 
indications  of  the  distaste  and  alarm  with  which  he  wit 
nessed  a  demand  that  newcomers  from  Europe,  or  some 
classes  of  them,  should  be  accorded  lesser  privileges  than 
they  had  enjoyed. 

^^tJiotionsloXfreedom  and  equality  as  applied  to  the 
negroes  presenteoa~~7eal  difficulty'.  rrThere  is,"  said 
'  Lincoln,  "  a  natural  disgust  in  the  minds  of  nearly  all 
white  people  at  the  idea  of  an  indiscriminate  amal 
gamation  of  the  white  and  black  men."  (We  might 
perhaps  add  that  as  the  inferior  race  becomes  educated 
and  rises  in  status  it  is  likely  itself  to  share  the  same 
disgust.)  Lincoln  himself  disliked  the  thought  of  inter 
marriage  between  the  races.  He  by  no  means  took  it 
for  granted  that  equality  in  political  power  must 
necessarily  and  properly  follow  upon  emancipation. 
Schemes  for  colonial  settlement  of  the  negroes  in^ 
Africa,  or  for  gradual  emancipation  accompanied  by 
educational  measures,  appealed  to  his  sympathy.  It 
was  not  given  him  to  take  a  part  in  the  settlement  after 
the  war,  and  it  is  impossible  to  guess  what  he  would 
have  achieved  as  a  constructive  statesman  ;  but  it  is 
certain  that  he  would  have  proceeded  with  caution  and 
with  the  patience  of  sure  faith  ;  and  he  had  that  human 
sympathy  with  the  white  people  of  the  South,  and  no 
less  with  the  slaves  themselves,  which  taught  him  the 
difficulty  of  the  problem.  But  difficult  as  the  problem 
was,  one  solution  was  certainly  wrong,  and  that  was  the 
permanent  acquiescence  in  slavery.  ^Twe  may  judge 
from  reiteration  in  his  speeches,  no  sophism  angered 
him  quite  so  much  as  the  very  popular  sophism  which 
de| ended  ,slav-ej^i)y_pies^nt;mg  a.  .1  i te ral-equality .  .as  thei 
real  alternatLve-to  it.  "  I  protest  against  the  counterfeit '\ 
logic  which  says  that  since  I  do  not  want  a  negro  woman 
for  my  slave  I  must  necessarily  want  her  for  my  wife. 
I  may  want  her  for  neither.  I  may  simply  let  her  alone. 
In  some  respects  she  is  certainly  not  my  equal.  But  in 
her  natural  right  to  eat  the  bread  which  she  has  earned 
by  the  sweat  of  her  brow,  she  is  my  equal  and  the 
equal  of  any  man!? 


124  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

The  men  who  had  made  the  Union  had,  as  Lincoln 
contended,  and  in  regard  to  most  of  them  contended 
justly,  been  true  to  principle  in  their  dealing  with  slavery. 
'  They  yielded  to  slavery,"  he  insists,  "  what  the 
necessity  of  the  case  required,  and  they  yielded  nothing 
more."  It  was,  as  we  know,  impossible  for  them  in 
federating  America,  however  much  they  might  hope  to 
inspire  the  new  nation  with  just  ideas,  to  take  the  power 
of  legislating  as  to  slavery  within  each  existing  State 
out  of  the  hands  of  that  State.  Such  power  as  they 
actually  possessed  of  striking  at  slavery  they  used,  as 
we  have  seen  and  as  Lincoln  recounted  in  detail,  with 
all  promptitude  and  almost  to  its  fullest  extent.  They 
reasonably  believed,  though  wrongly,  that  the  natural 
tendency  of  opinion  throughout  the  now  freed  Colonies 
with  principles  of  freedom  in  the  air  would  work  steadily 
towards  emancipation.  "  The  fathers,"  Lincoln  could 
fairly  say,  "  placed  slavery,  where  the  public  mind  could 
rest  in  the  belief  that  it  was  in  the  course  of  ultimate 
extinction."  The  task  for  statesmen  now  was  "  to  put 
slavery  back  where  the  fathers  placed  it." 

Now  this  by  no  means  implied  that  slavery  in  the 

States  which  now  adhered  to  it  should  be  exposed  to 

attack  from  outside,  or  the  slave  owner  be  denied  any 

right   which   he   could   claim   under   the   Constitution, 

however  odious  and  painful  it  might  be,  as  in  the  case 

of  the  rendition  of  fugitive  slaves,  to  yield  him  his  rights. 

\  "  We  allow,"  says  Lincoln,   "  slavery  to  exist  in  the 

\  slave    States,    not   because   it   is    right,  but   from   the 

1  necessities  of  the  Union.     We  grant  a  fugitive  slave  law 

'  because  it  is  so  (  nominated  in  the  bond  '  ;   because  our 

fathers  so  stipulated — had  to — and  we  are  bound  to 

carry  out  this  agreement."     And  the  obligations  to  the 

slave  owners  and  the  slave  States,  which  this  original 

agreement    and    the    fundamental    necessities    of    the 

|  Union    involved,    must    be    fulfilled    unswervingly,    in 

I  spirit  as  well  as  in  the  letter.     Lincoln  was  ready  to 

!  give  the  slave  States  any  possible  guarantee  that  the 

/   Constitution  should  not  be  altered  so  as  to  take  away 

/    their  existing  right  of  self-government  in  the  matter 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  125 

of  slavery.  He  had  remained  in  the  past  coldly  aloof 
from  the  Abolitionist  propaganda  when  Herndon  and 
other  friends  tried  to  interest  him  in  it,  feeling,  it  seems, 
that  agitation  in  the  free  States  against  laws  which 
existed  constitutionally  in  the  slave  States  was  not  only 
futile  but  improper.  With  all  his  power  he  dissuaded 
his  more  impulsive  friends  from  lending  any  aid  to 
forcible  and  unlawful  proceedings  in  defence  of  freedom , 
in  Kansas.  ^The  battle  of  freedom,"  he  exclaims  in  a 
vehement  plea  for  what  may  be  called  moderate 
against  radical  policy,  "  is  to  be  fought  out  on  principle 
Slavery  is  violation  of  eternal  right.  We  have  tern- 
porised  with  it  from  the  necessities  of  our  condition  ; 
but  as  sure  as  God  reigns  and  school  children  read,  that 
black  foul  lie  can  never  be  consecrated  into  God's 
hallowed  truth."  In  other  words,  the  sure  way  and  the 
only  way  to  combat  slavery  lay  in  the  firm  and  the  I 
scrupulous  assertion  of  principles  which  would  carry  1 
the  reason  and  the  conscience  of  the  people  with  them  ; 
the  repeal  of  the  prohibition  of  slavery  in  the  Territories 
was  a  defiance  of  such  principles,  but  so  too  in  its  way 
was  the  disregard  by  Abolitionists  of  the  rights  covenanted 
to  the  slave  States.  This  side  of  Lincoln's  doctrine 
is  apt  to  jar  upon  us.  We  feel  with  a  great  American 
historian  that  the  North  would  have  been  depraved 
indeed  if  it  had  not  bred  Abolitionists,  and  it  requires 
an  effort  to  sympathise  with  Lincoln's  rigidly  correct 
feeling — sometimes  harshly  expressed  and  sometimes 
apparently  cold.  It  is  not  possible  to  us,  as  it  was  to 
him  a  little  later,  to  look  on  John  Brown's  adventure 
merely  as  a  crime.  Nor  can  we  wonder  that,  when  he 
was  President  and  Civil  War  was  raging,  many  good! 
men  in  the  North  mistook  him  and  thought  him  half-i 
hearted,  because  he  persisted  in  his  respect  for  the  \ 
rights  of  the  Slave  States  so  long  as  there  seemed  to  be 
a  chance  of  saving  the  Union  in  that  way.  It  was  his 
primary  business,  he  then  said,  to  save  the  Union  if  he 
could  ;  "  if  I  could  save  the  Union  by  emancipating 
all  the  slaves  I  would  do  so  ;  if  I  could  save  it  by 
emancipating  none  of  them,  I  would  do  it ;  if  I  could 


126  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

•  save  it  by  emancipating  some  and  not  others,  I  would 
do  that  too."  But,  as  in  the  letter  at  the  beginning  of 
this  chapter  he  called  Speed  to  witness,  his  forbearance 
with  slavery  cost  him  real  pain,  and  we  shall  misread 
both  his  policy  as  President  and  his  character  as  a 
man  if  we  fail  to  see  that  in  the  bottom  of  his  mind  he 
felt  this  forbearance  to  be  required  by  the  very  same 
principles  which  roused  him  against  the  extension  of  the 
evil.  Years  before,  he  had  written  to  an  Abolitionist 
correspondent  that  respect  for  the  rights  of  the  slave 
States  was  due  not  only  to  the  Constitution  but,  "as  it 
seems  to  me,  in  a  sense  to  freedom  itself."  Negro 
slavery  was  not  the  only  important  issue,  nor  was  it 
an  isolated  issue,  what  really  was  in  issue  was  the 
continuance  of  the  nation  "  dedicated,"  as  he  said  on 
a  great  occasion,  "  to  the  proposition  that  all  men 
are  equal,"  a  nation  founded  by  the  Union  of  self- 
governing  communities,  some  of  which  lagged  far 
behind  the  others  in  applying  in  their  own  midst  the 
elementary  principles  of  freedom,  but  yet  a  nation 
actuated  from  its  very  foundation  in  some  important 
respects  by  the  acknowledgment  of  human  rights. 
Th£_£ractical  policy,  then,  on  which  his  whole  efforts 

/were  concentratetT'consisted  in  this  single  point — the 
express  recognition  of  the  essential  evil  of  slavery  by 
the  enactment  that  it  should  not  spread  further  in  the 
Territories  subject  to  the  Union.  If  slavery  were  thus 

^Shut  up  within  a  ring  fence  and  marked  as  a  wrong 
thing  which  the  Union  as  a  whole  might  tolerate  but 
would  not  be  a  party  to,  emancipation  in  the  slave 
States  would  follow  in  course  of  time.  It  would  come 
about,  Lincoln  certainly  thought,  in  a  way  far  better 
for  the  slaves  as  well  as  for  their  masters,  than  any 
forced  liberation.  He  was  content  to  wait  for  it.  "  I  do 
not  mean  that  when  it  takes  a  turn  towards  ultimate 
extinction,  it  will  be  in  a  day,  nor  in  a  year,  nor  in  two 
years.  I  do  not  suppose  that  in  the  most  peaceful 
way  ultimate  extinction  would  occur  in  less  than  a 
hundred  years  at  least ;  but  that  it  will  occur  in  the 
best  way  for  both  races  in  God's  own  good  time  I  have 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  127 

no  doubt."  If  we  wonder  whether  this  policy,  if  soon 
enough  adopted  by  the  Union  as  a  whole,  would  really 
have  brought  on  emancipation  in  the  South,  the  best 
answer  is  that,  when  the  policy  did  receive  national 
sanction  by  the  election  of  Lincoln,  the  principal  slave 
States  themselves  instinctively  recognised  it  as  fatal  to 
slavery. 

For  the  extinction  of  slavery  he  would  wait ;  for  a~^\ 
decision  on  the  principle  of  slavery  he  would  not.  It 
was  idle  to  protest  against  agitation  of  the  question. 
If  politicians  would  be  silent  that  would  not  get  rid 
of  "  this  same  mighty  deep-seated  power  that  somehow 
operates  on  the  minds  of  men,  exciting  them  and 
stirring  them  up  in  every  avenue  of  society — in  politics, 
in  religion,  in  literature,  in  morals,  in  all  the  manifold 
relations  of  life."  The  stand,  temperate  as  it  was,  that 
he  advocated  against  slavery  should  be  taken  at  once  1 
and  finally.  The  difference,  of  which  people  grown 
accustomed  to  slavery  among  their  neighbours  thought 
little,  between  letting  it  be  in  Missouri,  which  they  could 
not  help,  and  letting  it  cross  the  border  into  Kansas, 
which  they  could  help,  appeared  to  Lincoln  the  whole 
tremendous  gulf  between  right  and  wrong,  between  a 
wise  people's  patience  with  ills  they  could  not  cure  and 
a  profligate  people's  acceptance  of  evil  as  their  good. 
And  here  there  was  a  distinction  between  Lincoln  and 
many  Republicans,  which  again  may  seem  subtle,  but 
which  was  really  far  wider  than  that  which  separated 
him  from  the  Abolitionists.  Slavery  must  be  stopped 
from  spreading  into  Kansas  not  because  as  it  turned 
out  the  immigrants  into  Kansas  mostly  did  not  want  it, 
but  because  it  was  wrong,  and  the  United  States,  where 
they  were  free  to  act,  would  not  have  it.  The  greatest 
evil  in  the  repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  was  the 
laxity  of  public  tone  which  had  made  it  possible. 
"  Little  by  little,  but  steadily  as  man's  march  to  the 
grave,  we  have  been  giving  up  the  old  faith  for  the  new 
faith."  Formerly  some  deference  to  the  "  central 
idea  "  of  equality  was  general  and  in  some  sort  of 
abstract  sense  slavery  was  admitted^  to  be  wrong.  Now 


128  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

it  was  boldly  claimed  by  the  South  that  "  slavery  in  the 
abstract  was  right."  All  the  most  powerful  influences 
in  the  country,  "  Mammon  "  (for  "  the  slave  property 
is  worth  a  billion  dollars  "),  "  fashion,  philosophy,"  and 
even  "  the  theology  of  the  day,"  were  enlisted  in  favour 
of  this  opinion.  And  it  met  with  no  resistance.  \"  You 
yourself  may  detest  slavery  ;  but  your  neighbour  has 
five  or  six  slaves,  and  he  is  an  excellent  neighbour,  or 
your  son  has  married  his  daughter,  and  they  beg  you  to 
help  save  their  property,  and  you  vote  against  your 
interests  and  principle  to  oblige  a  neighbour,  hoping 
your  vote  will  be  on  the  losing  side."  And  again 
"  the  party  lash  and  the  fear  of  ridicule  will  overawe 
justice  and  liberty  ;  for  it  is  a  singular  fact,  but  none 
the  less  a  fact  and  well  known  by  the  most  common 
experience,  that  men  will  do  things  under  the  terror  of 
the  party  lash  that  they  would  not  on  any  account  or 
for  any  consideration  do  otherwise  ;  while  men,  who 
will  march  up  to  the  mouth  of  a  loaded  cannon  with 
out  shrinking,  will  run  from  the  terrible  name  of 
'  Abolitionist,'  even  when  pronounced  by  a  worthless 
creature  whom  they  with  good  reason  despise.'^  And  so 
people  in  the  North,  who  could  hardly  stomach  the 
doctrine  that  slavery  was  good,  yet  lapsed  into  the 
feeling  that  it  was  a  thing  indifferent,  a  thing  for  which 
they  might  rightly  shuffle  off  their  responsibility  on  to 
the  immigrants  into  Kansas.  TluVfe^ling  that  it  was 
indifferent  Lincoln  pursued  and  chastised  with  special 
scorn.  But  the  principle  of  freedom  that  they  were 
surrendering  was  the  principle  of  freedom  for  themselves 
as  well  as  for  the  negro.  The  sense  of  the  negro's  rights 
had  been  allowed  to  go  back  till  the  prospect  of 
emancipation  for  him  looked  immeasurably  worse  than 
it  had  a  generation  before.  They  must  recognise  that 
when,  by  their  connivance,  they  had  barred  and  bolted 
the  door  upon  the  negro,  the  spirit  of  tyranny  which 
they  had  evoked  would  then  "  turn  and  rend  them." 
The  "  central  idea  "  which  had  now  established  itself 
in  the  intellect  of  the  Southern  was  one  which  favoured 
the  enslavement  of  man  by  man  "  apart  from  colour." 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  129 

A  definite  choice  had  to  be  made  between  the  principle 
of  the  fathers  which  asserted  certain  rights  for  all  men, 
and  that  other  principle  against  which  the  fathers  had 
rebelled  and  of  which  the  "  divine  right  of  kings  " 
furnished  Lincoln  with  his  example.  In  what  particular 
manner  the  white  people  would  be  made  to  feel  the 
principle  of  tyranny  when  they  had  definitely  "  denied 
freedom  to  others "  and  ceased  to  "  deserve  it  for 
themselves "  Lincoln  did  not  attempt  to  say,  and 
perhaps  only  dimly  imagined.  But  he  was  as  convinced 
as  any  prophet  that  America  stood  at  the  parting  of  the 
ways  and  must  choose  now  the  right  principle  or  the 
wrong  with  all  its  consequences. 

The  principle  of  tyranny  presented  itself  for  their 
choice  in  a  specious  form  in  Douglas'  "  great,  patent, 
everlasting  principle  of  '  popular  sovereignty.'  '  This 
alleged  principle  was  likely,  so  to  say,  to  take  upon  their 
blind  side  men  who  were  sympathetic  to  the  impatience 
of  control  of  any  crowd  resembling  themselves  but  not 
sympathetic  to  humanity  of  another  race  and  colour. 
"The  claim  to  some  divine  and  indefeasible  right  of  I 
sovereignty  overriding  all  other  considerations  of  the! 
general  good,  on  the  part  of  a  majority  greater  or/ 
smaller  at  any  given  time  in  any  given  area,  is  one  which 
rcan  generally  be  made  to  bear  a  liberal  semblance,  though 
it  certainly  has  no  necessary  validity.  Americans  had 
never  before  thought  of  granting  it  in  the  case  of  their 
outlying  and  unsettled  dominions  ;  they  would  never  for 
instance,  as  Lincoln  remarked,  have  admitted  the  claim 
of  settlers  like  the  Mormons  to  make  polygamy  lawful 
in  the  territory  they  occupied.  In  the  manner  in  which 
it  was  now  employed  the  proposed  principle  could,  as 
Lincoln  contended,  be  reduced  to  this  simple  form  "  that, 
if  one  man  chooses  to  enslave  another,  no  third  man  shall 
have  the  right  to  object." 

It  is  impossible  to  estimate  how  far  Lincoln  foresaw 
the  strain  to  which  a  firm  stand  against  slavery  would 
subject  the  Union.  It  is  likely  enough  that  those 
worst  forebodings  for  the  Union,  which  events  proved 
to  be  very  true,  were  confined  to  timid  men  who  made  a 


130  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

practice  of  yielding  to  threats.  Lincoln  appreciated 
better  than  many  of  his  fellows  the  sentiment  of  the 
South,  but  it  is  often  hard  for  men,  not  in  immediate 
contact  with  a  school  of  thought  which  seems  to  them 
thoroughly  perverse,  to  appreciate  its  pervasive  power, 
and  Lincoln  was  inclined  to  stake  much  upon  the  hope 
that  reason  will  prevail.  Moreover,  he  had  a  confidence 
in  the  strength  of  the  Union  which  might  have  been 
justified  if  his  predecessor  in  office  had  been  a  man  of 
ordinary  firmness.  But  it  is  not  to  be  supposed  that 
any  undue  hopefulness,  if  he  felt  it,  influenced  his 
judgment.  He  was  of  a  temper  which  does  not  seek  to 
forecast  what  the  future  has  to  show,  and  his  melancholy 
prepared  him  well  for  any  evil  that  might  come.  Two 
things  we  can  say  with  certainty  of  his  aim  and  purpose. 
tOn  the  one  hand,  as  has  already  been  said,  whatever 
/view  he  had  taken  of  the  peril  to  the  Union  he  would 
/  never  have  sought  to  avoid  the  peril  "by  what  appeared 
I  to  him  a  surrender  of  the  principle  which  gave  the  Union 
t  its  worth.  On  the  other  hand,  he  must  always  have  been 
prepared  to  uphold  the  Union  at  whatever  the  cost 
might  prove  to  be.  To  a  man  of  deep  and  gentle  nature 
Jwar  will  always  be  hateful,  but  it  can  never,  any  more 
I  than  an  individual  death,  appear  the  worst  of  evils. 
And  the  claim  of  the  Southern  States  to  separate  from 
a  community  which  to  him  was  venerable  and  to  form 
a  new  nation,  based  on  slavery  and  bound  to  live  in 
discord  with  its  neighbours,  did  not  appeal  to  him  at  all, 
though  in  a  certain  literal  sense  it  was  a  claim  to  liberty. 
His  attitude  to  any  possible  movement  for  secession 
was  defined  four  years  at  least  before  secession  came,  in 
words  such  as  it  was  not  his  habit  to  use  without  full 
sense  of  their  possible  effect  or  without  much  previous 
thought.  They  were  quite  simple  :  "  We  won't  break 
up  the  Union,  and  you  shan't." 

Such  were  the  main  thoughts  which  would  be  found 
to  animate  the  whole  of  Lincoln's  notable  campaign, 
beginning  with  his  first  encounter  with  Douglas  in 
1855  an(i  culminating  in  his  prolonged  duel  with  him 
in  the  autumn  of  1858,  It  is  unnecessary  here  to  follow 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  131 

the  complexities,  especially  in  regard  to  the  Dred 
Scott  judgments,  through  which  the  discussion  wandered. 
It  is  now  worth  few  men's  while  to  do  more  than  glance 
at  two  or  three  of  his  speeches  at  that  period;  his  speeches 
in  the  formal  Lincoln-Douglas  debates,  except  the  first, 
are  not  the  best  of  them.  A  scientific  student  of 
"rhetoric,  as  the  art  by  which  men  do  actually  persuade 
-crowds,  might  indeed  do  well  to  watch  closely  the  use 
by  Douglas  and  Lincoln  of  their  respective  weapons, 
but  for  most  of  us  it  is  an  unprofitable  business  to  read 
reiterated  argument,  even  though  in  beautiful  language, 
upon  points  of  doubt  that  no  longer  trouble  us.  Lincoln 
does  not  always  show  to  advantage  ;  later  readers  have 
found  him  inferior  in  urbanity  to  Douglas,  of  whom  he 
disapproved,  while  Douglas  probably  disapproved  of 
no  man  ;  his  speeches  are,  of  course,  not  free  either  from 
unsound  arguments  or  from  the  rough  and  tumble  of 
popular  debate  ;  occasionally  he  uses  hackneyed  phrases; 
but  it  is  remarkable  that  a  hackneyed  or  a  falsely  senti 
mental  phrase  in  Lincoln  comes  always  as  a  lapse  and 
a  surprise.  Passages  abound  in  these  speeches  which  to 
almost  any  literate  taste  are  arresting  for  the  simple 
beauty  of  their  English,  a  beauty  characteristic  of  one 
who  had  learned  to  reason  with  Euclid  and  learned  to 
feel  and  to  speak  with  the  authors  of  the  Bible.  And 
in  their  own  kind  they  were  a  classic  and  probably 
unsurpassed  achievement.  Though  Lincoln  had  to  deal  > 
with  a  single  issue  demanding  n©  great  width  of  know 
ledge,  it  must  be  evident  that  the  passions  aroused  by 
it  and  the  confused  and  shifting  state  of  public  senti 
ment  made  his  problem  very  subtle,  and  it  was  a  rare 
profundity  and  sincerity  of  thought  which  solved  it  in 
his  own  mind.  In  expressing  the  result  of  thought  so 
far  deeper  than  that  of  most  men,  he  achieved  a  clearness 
of  expression  which  very  few  writers,  and  those  among 
the  greatest,  have  excelled.  He  once  during  the 
Presidential  election  of  1856  wrote  to  a  supporter  of 
Fillmore  to  persuade  him  of  a  proposition  which  must 
seem  paradoxical  to  anyone  not  deeply  versed  in 
American  institutions,  namely  that  it  was  actually 


132  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

against  Fillmore's  interest  to  gain  votes  from  Fremont 
in  Illinois.  He  demonstrated  his  point,  but  he  was  not 
always  judicious  in  his  way  of  addressing  solemn 
strangers,  and  in  his  rural  manner  he  concludes  his 
letter,  "  the  whole  thing  is  as  simple  as  figuring  out  the 
weight  of  three  small  hogs,"  and  this  inelegant  sentence 
conveys  with  little  exaggeration  one  especial  merit  of 
his  often  austerely  graceful  language.  Grave  difficulties 
are  handled  in  a  style  which  could  arouse  all  the  interest 
of  a  boy  and  penetrate  the  understanding  of  a  case- 
hardened  party  man. 

But  if  in  comparison  with  the  acknowledged  master 
pieces  of  our  prose  we  rank  many  passages  in  these 
speeches  very  high — and  in  fact  the  men  who  have 
appreciated  them  most  highly  have  been  fastidious 
scholars — we  shall  not  yet  have  measured  Lincoln's 
effort  and  performance.  For  these  are  not  the  com 
positions  of  a  cloistered  man  of  letters,  they  are  the 
outpourings  of  an  agitator  upon  the  stump.  The  men 
who  think  hard  are  few  ;  few  of  them  can  clothe  their 
thought  in  apt  and  simple  words  ;  very,  very  few  are 
those  who  in  doing  this  could  hold  the  attention  of  a 
;  miscellaneous  and  large  crowd.  Popular  government 
owes  that  comparative  failure,  of  which  in  recent  times 
we  have  taken  perhaps  exaggerated  notice,  partly  to 
the  blindness  of  the  polite  world  to  the  true  difficulty 
and  true  value  of  work  of  this  kind  ;  and  the  importance 
which  Roman  education  under  the  Empire  gave  to 
rhetoric  was  the  mark  not  of  deadness,  but  of  the  survival 
of  a  manly  public  spirit.  Lincoln's  wisdom  had  to 
utter  itself  in  a  voice  which  would  reach  the  outskirts 
of  a  large  and  sometimes  excited  crowd  in  the  open  air. 
It  was  uttered  in  strenuous  conflict  with  a  man  whose 
reputation  quite  overshadowed  his  ;  a  person  whose 
extraordinary  and  good-humoured  vitality  armed  him 
with  an  external  charm  even  for  people  who,  like  Mrs. 
Beecher  Stowe,  detested  his  principles  ;  an  orator  whose 
mastery  of  popular  appeal  and  of  resourceful  and 
evasive  debate  was  quite  unhampered  by  any  weakness 
for  the  truth.  The  utterance  had  to  be  kept  up  day 


THE   RISE   OF  LINCOLN  133 

after  day  and  night  after  night  for  a  quarter  of  a  year, 
by  a  man  too  poor  to  afford  little  comforts,  travelling 
from  one  crowded  inn  to  another,  by  slow  trains  on  a 
railway  whose  officials  were  uncivil  to  him — while,  by 
the  way,  its  general  manager,  McClellan,  of  whom  much 
more  hereafter,  took  care  that  Douglas  travelled  soft. 
The  physical  strain  of  electioneering,  which  is  always 
considerable,  its  alternation  of  feverish  excitement  with 
a  lassitude  that,  after  a  while,  becomes  prevailing  and 
intense,  were  in  this  case  far  greater  and  more  prolonged 
than  in  any  other  instance  recorded  of  English  or 
probably  of  American  statesmen.  If,  upon  his  sudden 
elevation  shortly  afterwards,  Lincoln  was  in  a  sense  an 
obscure  man  raised  up  by  chance,  he  was  nevertheless 
a  man  who  had  accomplished  a  heroic  labour. 

On  the  whole  the  earthen  vessel  in  which  he  carried  his 
treasure  of  clear  thought  and  clean  feeling  appears  to 
have  enhanced  its  flavour.  There  was  at  any  rate 
nothing  outward  about  him  that  aroused  the  passion  of 
envy.  A  few  peculiarly  observant  men  were  immediately 
impressed  with  his  distinction,  but  there  is  no  doubt  that 
to  the  ordinary  stranger  he  appeared  as  a  very  odd  fish. 
"  No  portraits  that  I  have  ever  seen,"  writes  one,  "  do 
justice  to  the  awkwardness  and  ungainliness  of  his 
figure."  Its  movements  when  he  began  to  speak  rather 
added  to  its  ungainliness,  and,  though  to  a  trained  actor 
his  elocution  seemed  perfect,  his  voice  when  he  first 
opened  his  mouth  surprised  and  jarred  upon  the  hearers 
with  a  harsh  note  of  curiously  high  pitch.  But  it  was 
the  sort  of  oddity  that  arrests  attention,  and  people's 
attention  once  caught  was  apt  to  be  held  by  the  man's 
transparent  earnestness.  Soon,  as  he  lost  thought  of 
himself  in  his  subject,  his  voice  and  manner  changed ; 
deeper  notes,  of  which  friends  record  the  beauty,  rang 
out,  the  sad  eyes  kindled,  and  the  tall,  gaunt  figure, 
with  the  strange  gesture  of  the  long,  uplifted  arms, 
acquired  even  a  certain  majesty.  Hearers  recalled 
afterwards  with  evident  sincerity  the  deep  and  in 
stantaneous  impression  of  some  appeal  to  simple  con- 
as  when,  "  reaching  his  hands  towards  the 


134  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

stars  of  that  still  night,"  he  proclaimed,  "  in  some 
things  she  is  certainly  not  my  equal,  but  in  her  natural 
right  to  eat  the  bread  that  she  has  earned  with  the 
sweat  of  her  brow,  she  is  my  equal,  and  the  equal  of 
Judge  Douglas,  and  the  equal  of  any  man."  Indeed 
upon  a  sympathetic  audience,  already  excited  by  the 
occasion,  he  could  produce  an  effect  which  the  reader 
of  his  recorded  speeches  would  hardly  believe.  Of  his 
speech  at  the  first  national  convention  of  the  Republican 
party  there  is  no  report  except  that  after  a  few  sentences 
every  reporter  laid  down  his  pen  for  the  opposite  of  the 
usual  reason,  and,  as  he  proceeded,  "  the  audience  arose 
from  their  chairs  and  with  pale  faces  and  quivering 
lips  pressed  unconsciously  towards  him."  And  of  his 
speech  on  another  similar  occasion  several  witnesses 
seem  to  have  left  descriptions  hardly  less  incongruous 
with  English  experience  of  public  meetings.  If  we 
credit  him  with  these  occasional  manifestations  of 
electric  oratory — as  to  which  it  is  certain  that  his 
quiet  temperament  did  at  times  blaze  out  in  a  surprising 
fashion — it  is  not  to  be  thought  that  he  was  ordinarily 
what  could  be  called  eloquent  ;  some  of  his  speeches 
are  commonplace  enough,  and  much  of  his  debating 
with  Douglas  is  of  a  drily  argumentative  kind  that  does 
honour  to  the  mass  meetings  which  heard  it  gladly. 
/  But  the  greatest  gift  of  the  orator  he  did  possess  ;  the 
i  personality  behind  the  words  was  felt.  "  Beyond  and 
above  all  skill,"  says  the  editor  of  a  great  paper  who 
heard  him  at  Peoria,  "  was  the  overwhelming  conviction 
imposed  upon  the  audience  that  the  speaker  himself 
was  charged  with  an  irresistible  and  inspiring  duty  to 
his  fellow  men." 

One  fact  about  the  method  of  his  speaking  is  easily 
detected.  In  debate,  at  least,  he  had  no  use  for 
perorations,  and  the  reader  who  looks  for  them  will  often 
find  that  Lincoln  just  used  up  the  last  few  minutes  in 
clearing  up  some  unimportant  point  which  he  wanted 
to  explain  only  if  there  was  time  for  it.  We  associate 
our  older  Parliamentary  oratory  with  an  art  which 
keeps  the  hearer  pleasedly  expectant  rather  than 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  135 

dangerously  attentive,  though  an  argument  which  if 
dwelt  upon  might  prove  unsubstantial,  secure  that  it 
all  leads  in  the  end  to  some  great  cadence  of  noble 
sound.  But  in  Lincoln's  argumentative  speeches  the 
employment  of  beautiful  words  is  least  sparing  at  the 
beginning  or  when  he  passes  to  a  new  subject.  It 
seems  as  if  he  deliberately  used  up  his  rhetorical  effects 
at  the  outset  to  put  his  audience  in  the  temper  in  which 
they  would  earnestly  follow  him  and  to  challenge  their 
full  attention  to  reasoning  which  was  to  satisfy  their 
calmer  judgment.  He  put  himself  in  a  position  in  which 
if  his  argument  wCTg^^ 

spe^cTrtrom  failure  assT.speech..  Pe.rh.aps  no  standing 
epithet  of  praise  hangs  with  such  a  weight  on  a  man's 
reputation  as  the  epithet  "  honest. '*  When  the  man  is 
proved  not  to  be  a  fraud,  it  suggests  a  very  mediocre 
virtue.  But  the  method  by  which  Lincoln  actually 
confirmed  his  early  won  and  dangerous  reputation  of 
honesty  was  a  positive  and  potent  performance  of  rare 
distinction.  It  is  no  mean  intellectual  and  spiritual 
achievement  to  be  as  honest  in  speech  with  a  crowd  as 
in  the  dearest  intercourse  of  life.  It  is  not,  of  course, 
pretended  that  he  never  used  a  fallacious  argument  or 
made  an  unfair  score — he  was  entirely  human.  But 
this  is  the  testimony  of  an  Illinois  political  wire-puller 
to  Lincoln  :  "  He  was  one  of  the  shrewdest  politicians 
in  the  State.  Nobody  had  more  experience  in  that 
way.  Nobody  knew  better  what  was  passing  in  the 
minds  of  the  people.  Nobody  knew  better  how  to 
turn  things  to  advantage  politically."  And  then  he 
goes  on — and  this  is  really  the  sum  of  what  is  to  be 
said  of  his  oratory  :  "  He  could  not  cheat  people  out 
of  their  votes  any  mof^Th^trlTe^  could  out  of  their 
money." 

3.  Lincoln  against  Douglas. 

It  has  now  to  be  told  how  the  contest  with  Douglas 
which  concluded  Lincoln's  labours  in  Illinois  affected 
the  broad  stream  of  political  events  in  America  as  a 
whole.  Lincoln,  as  we  know,  was  still  only  a  local 


136  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

personage  ;  Illinois  is  a  State  bigger  than  Ireland,  but 
it  is  only  a  little  part  and  was  still  a  rather  raw  and 
provincial  part  of  the  United  States  ;  but  Douglas  had 
for  years  been  a  national  personage,  for  a  time  the 
greatest  man  among  the  Democrats,  and  now,  for  a 
reason  which  did  him  honour,  he  was  in  disgrace  with 
many  of  his  party  and  on  the  point  of  becoming  the 
hero  of  all  moderate  Republicans. 

We  need  not  follow  in  much  detail  the  events  of  the 
great  political  world.  The  repeal  of  the  Missouri 
Compromise  threw  it  into  a  ferment,  which  the  con 
tinuing  disorders  in  Kansas  were  in  themselves  sufficient 
to  keep  up.  New  great  names  were  being  made  in 
debate  in  the  Senate  ;  Seward,  the  most  powerful 
opponent  of  the  repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise, 
kept  his  place  as  the  foremost  man  in  the  Republican 
party  not  by  consistency  in  the  stand  that  he  made,  but 
by  his  mastery  of  New  York  political  machinery ; 
Sumner  of  Massachusetts,  the  friend  of  John  Bright, 
kept  up  a  continual  protest  for  freedom  in  turgid, 
scholarly  harangues,  which  caught  the  spirit  of  Cicero's 
Philippics  most  successfully  in  their  personal  offensive- 
ness.  Powerful  voices  in  literature  and  the  Press  were 
heard  upon  the  same  side — the  New  York  Tribune, 
edited  by  Horace  Greeley,  acquired,  as  far  as  a  paper 
In  so  large  a  country  can,  a  national  importance. 
Broadly  it  may  be  said  that  the  stirring  intellect  of 
America  old  and  young  was  with  the  Republicans — it  is 
a  pleasant  trifle  to  note  that  Longfellow  gave  up  a  visit 
to  Europe  to  vote  for  Fremont  as  President,  and  we 
know  the  views  of  Motley  and  of  Lowell  and  of  Darwin's 
fellow  labourer  Asa  Grey.  But  fashion  and  that  better 
and  quite  different  influence,  the  tone  of  opinion  pre 
vailing  in  the  pleasantest  society,  inclined  always  to 
the  Southern  view  of  every  question,  and  these  influences 
were  nowhere  more  felt  than  among  Washington  poli 
ticians,  A  strong  and  respectable  group  of  Southern 
senators,  of  whom  Jefferson  Davis  was  the  strongest, 
were  the  real  driving  power  of  the  administration.  Con 
vivial  President  Pierce  and  doting  President  Buchanan 


THE   RISE  OF  LINCOLN  137 

after  him  were  complaisant  to  their  least  scrupulous 
suggestions  in  a  degree  hardly  credible  of  honourable 
men  who  were  not  themselves  Southerners. 

One  famous  incident  of  life  in  Congress  must  be  told 
to  explain  the  temper  of  the  times.  In  1856,  during 
one  of  the  many  debates  that  arose  out  of  Kansas, 
Sumner  recited  in  the  Senate  a  speech  conscientiously 
calculated  to  sting  the  slave-owning  Senators  to  madness. 
Sumner  was  a  man  with  brains  and  with  courage  and 
rectitude  beyond  praise,  set  off  by  a  powerful  and  noble 
frame,  but  he  lacked  every  minor  quality  of  greatness. 
He  would  not  call  his  opponent  in  debate  a  skunk,  but 
he  would  expend  great  verbal  ingenuity  in  coupling  his 
name  with  repeated  references  to  that  animal's  attributes. 
On  this  occasion  he  used  to  the  full  both  the  finer  and 
the  most  exquisitely  tasteless  qualities  of  his  eloquence. 
This  sort  of  thing  passed  the  censorship  of  many 
excellent  Northern  men  who  would  lament  Lincoln's 
lack  of  refinement  ;  and  though  from  first  to  last  the 
serious  provocation  in  their  disputes  lay  in  the  set 
policy  of  the  Southern  leaders,  it  ought  to  be  realised 
that  they,  men  who  for  the  most  part  were  quite  kind 
to  their  slaves  and  had  long  ago  argued  themselves  out 
of  any  compunction  about  slavery,  were  often  exposed 
to  intense  verbal  provocation.  Nevertheless,  what 
followed  on  Sumner's  speech  is  terribly  significant  of  the 
depravation  of  Southern  honour. 

Congressman  Preston  Brooks,  of  South  Carolina,  had 
an  uncle  in  the  Senate  ;  South  Carolina,  and  this  Senator 
in  particular,  had  been  specially  favoured  with  self- 
righteous  insolence  in  Sumner's  speech.  A  day  or  so 
later  the  Senate  had  just  risen  and  Sumner  sat  writing 
at  his  desk  in  the  Senate  house  in  a  position  in  which 
he  could  not  quickly  rise.  Brooks  walked  in,  burning 
with  piety  towards  his  State  and  his  uncle,  and  in  the 
presence,  it  seems,  of  Southern  Senators  who  could  have 
stopped  him,  beat  Sumner  on  the  head  with  a  stick 
with  all  his  might.  Sumner  was  incapacitated  by  in 
juries  to  his  spine  for  nearly  five  years.  Brooks,  with 
a  virtuous  air,  explained  in  Congress  that  he  had  caught 


138  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Sumner  in  a  helpless  attitude  because  if  Sumner  had 
been  free  to  use  his  superior  strength  he,  Brooks,  would 
have  had  to  shoot  him  with  his  revolver.  It  seems  to  be 
hardly  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  the  whole  South 
applauded  Brooks  and  exulted.  Exuberant  Southerners 
took  to  challenging  Northern  men,  knowing  well  that 
their  principles  compelled  them  to  refuse  duels,  but 
that  the  refusal  would  still  be  humiliating  to  the  North. 
Brooks  himself  challenged  Senator  Burlingame,  a  dis 
tinguished  man  afterwards  sent  by  Lincoln  as  Minister 
to  China,  who  had  denounced  him.  Burlingame  ac 
cepted,  and  his  second  arranged  for  a  rifle  duel  at  a  wild 
spot  across  the  frontier  at  Niagara.  Brooks  then  drew 
back  ;  he  alleged,  perhaps  sincerely,  that  he  would  have 
been  murdered  on  his  way  through  the  Northern 
States,  but  Northern  people  were  a  little  solaced.  The 
whole  disgusting  story  contains  only  one  pleasant 
incident.  Preston  Brooks,  after  numbers  of  con 
gratulations,  testimonials,  and  presentations,  became 
weary,  as  he  himself  said,  of  being  the  hero  of  every 
vulgar  bully  in  the  South,  and  within  a  year  of  his 
famous  exploit  took  his  own  life. 

Now,  though  this  dangerous  temper  burned  steadily  in 
the  South,  and  there  were  always  sturdy  Republicans 
ready  to  provoke  it,  and  questions  arising  out  of  slavery 
would  constantly  recur  to  disturb  high  political  circles, 
it  is  not  to  be  imagined  that  opinion  in  the  North, 
the  growing  and  bustling  portion  of  the  States,  would 
remain  for  years  excited  about  the  repeal  of  the  Missouri 
Compromise.  In  1857  men's  minds  were  agitated  by 
a  great  commercial  depression  and  collapse  of  credit, 
and  in  1858  there  took  place  one  of  the  most  curious 
(for  it  would  seem  to  have  deserved  this  cold  description) 
of  evanescent  religious  revivals.  Meanwhile,  by  1857 
the  actual  bloodshed  in  Kansas  had  come  to  an  end  under 
the  administration  of  an  able  Governor  ;  the  enormous 
majority  of  settlers  in  Kansas  were  now  known  to  be 
against  slavery  and  it  was  probably  assumed  that  the 
legalisation  of  slavery  could  not  be  forced  upon  them. 
Prohibition  of  slavery  there  by  Congress  thus  began  to 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  139 

seem  needless,  and  the  Dred  Scott  judgments  raised  at 
least  a  grave  doubt  as  to  whether  it  was  possible.  Thus 
enthusiasm  for  the  original  platform  of  the  Republicans 
was  cooling  down,  and  to  the  further  embarrassment  of 
that  party,  when  towards  the  end  of  1857  the  Southern 
leaders  attempted  a  legislative  outrage,  the  great 
champion  of  the  Northern  protest  was  not  a  Republican, 
but  Douglas  himself. 

A  Convention  had  been  elected  in  Kansas  to  frame  a 
State  Constitution.  It  represented  only  a  fraction  of 
the  people,  since,  for  some  reason  good  or  bad,  the 
opponents  of  slavery  did  not  vote  in  the  election.  But 
it  was  understood  that  whatever  Constitution  was 
framed  would  be  submitted  to  the  popular  vote.  The 
Convention  framed  a  Constitution  which  legalised 
slavery.  A  Bill  was  introduced  into  Congress,  backed 
by  the  influence  of  Buchanan,  under  which  the  people 
of  Kansas  were  to  vote  whether  they  would  have  this 
Constitution  as  it  stood,  or  have  it  with  the  legalisation 
of  slavery  restricted  to  the  slaves  who  had  then  been 
brought  into  the  territory.  No  opportunity  was  to  be 
given  them  of  rejecting  the  Constitution  altogether, 
though  Governor  Walker,  himself  in  favour  of  slavery, 
assured  the  President  that  they  wished  to  do  so. 
Ultimately,  by  way  of  concession  to  vehement  resist 
ance,  the  majority  in  Congress  passed  an  Act  under 
which  the  people  in  Kansas  were  to  vote  simply 
for  or  against  the  slavery  Constitution  as  it  stood, 
only — if  they  voted  for  it,  they  as  a  State  were  to  be 
rewarded  with  a  large  grant  of  public  lands  belonging 
to  the  Union  in  their  territory.  Eventually,  the  Kansas 
people,  unmoved  by  this  bribe,  rejected  the  Constitution 
by  a  majority  of  more  than  11,000  to  1,800.  Now, 
the  Southern  leaders,  three  years  before,  had  eagerly 
joined  with  Douglas  to  claim  a  right  of  free  choice  for 
the  Kansas  people.  The  shamelessness  of  this  attempt 
to  trick  them  out  of  it  is  more  significant  even  than  the 
tale  of  Preston  Brooks.  There  was  no  hot  blood  there  ; 
the  affair  was  quietly  plotted  by  respected  leaders  of 
the  South.  They  were  men  in  many  ways  of  character 


i4o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

and  honour,  understood  by  weak  men  like  Buchanan 
tcr'represent  the  best  traditions  of  American  public  life. 
y'fiut,  as  they  showed  also  in  other  instances  that  cannot 
be  related  here,  slavery  had  become  for  them  a  sacred 
cause  which  hallowed  almost  any  means.  It  is  essential 
to  remember  this  in  trying  to  understand  the  then 
political  situation/*^ 

Douglas  here  -'behaved  very  honourably.  He,  with 
his  cause  of  popular  sovereignty,  could  not  have 
afforded  to  identify  himself  with  the  fraud  on  Kansas, 
but  he  was  a  good  enough  trickster  to  have  made  his 
protest  safely  if  he  had  cared  to  do  so.  As  it  was  he 
braved  the  hatred  of  Buchanan  and  the  fury  of  his 
Southern  friends  by  instant,  manly,  courageous,  and 
continued  opposition.  It  may  therefore  seem  an  un 
gracious  thing  that,  immediately  after  this,  Lincoln 
should  have  accepted  the  invitation  of  his  friends  to 
oppose  Douglas'  re-election.  To  most  of  the  leading 
Republicans  out  of  Illinois,  it  seemed  altogether  unwise 
and  undesirable  that  their  party,  which  had  seemed  to 
be  losing  ground,  should  do  anything  but  welcome 
Douglas  as  an  ally.  Of  these  Seward  indeed  went  too 
far  for  his  friends,  and  in  his  sanguine  hope  that  it 
would  work  for  freedom  was  ready  to  submit  to  the 
doctrine  of  "  popular  sovereignty  "  ;  but,  except  the 
austere  Chase,  now  Governor  of  Ohio,  who  this  once, 
but  unfortunately  not  again,  was  whole-heartedly  with 
Lincoln,  the  Republican  leaders  in  the  East,  and  great 
Republican  journals,  like  the  Tribune ,  declared  their 
wish  that  Douglas  should  be  re-elected.  Why,  then,  did 
Lincoln  stand  against  him  ? 

It  has  often  been  suggested  that  his  personal  feelings 
towards  Douglas  played  some  part  in  the  matter, 
though  no  one  thinks  they  played  the  chief  part. 
Probably  they  did  play  a  part,  and  it  is  a  relief  to 
think  that  Lincoln  thoroughly  gratified  some  minor 
feelings  in  this  contest.  Lincoln  no  doubt  enjoyed 
measuring  himself  against  other  men ;  and  it  was 
galling  to  his  ambition  to  have  been  so  completely 
outstripped  by  a  man  inferior  to  him  in  every  power 


THE   RISE  OF  LINCOLN  141 

except  that  of  rapid  success.  He  had  also  the  deepest 
distrust  for  Douglas  as  a  politician,  thinking  that  he  had 
neither  principle  nor  scruple,  though  Herndon,  who 
knew,  declares  he  neither  distrusted  nor  had  cause  to 
distrust  Douglas  in  his  professional  dealings  as  a  lawyer. 
He  had,  by  the  way,  one  definite,  if  trifling,  score  to 
wipe  off.  After  their  joint  debate  at  Peoria  in  1855 
Douglas,  finding  him  hard  to  tackle,  suggested  to 
Lincoln  that  they  should  both  undertake  to  make  no 
more  speeches  for  the  present.  Lincoln  oddly  assented 
at  once,  perhaps  for  no  better  reason  than  a  ridiculous 
difficulty,  to  which  he  once  confessed,  in  refusing  any 
request  whatever.  Lincoln  of  course  had  kept  this 
agreement  strictly,  while  Douglas  had  availed  himself 
of  the  first  temptation  to  break  it.  Thus  on  all  grounds 
we  may  be  sure  that  Lincoln  took  pleasure  in  now 
opposing  Douglas.  But  to  go  further  and  say  that  the 
two  men  cordially  hated  each  other  is  probably  to 
misread  both.  '  There  is  no  necessary  connection  between\ 
a  keen  desire  to  beat  a  man  and  any  sort  of  malignity 
towards  him.  That  much  at  least  may  be  learned  in 
English  schools,  and  the  whole  history  of  his  dealing 
with  men  shows  that  in  some  school  or  other  Lincoln 
had  learned  it  very  thoroughly.  Douglas,  too,  though 
an  unscrupulous,  was  not,  we  may  guess,  an  ungenerous 
man. 

But  the  main  fact  of  the  matter  is  that  Lincoln  would 
have  turned  traitor  to  his  rooted  convictions  if  he  had 
not  stood  up  and  fought  Douglas  even  at  this  moment 
when  Douglas  was  deserving  of  some  sympathy. 
Douglas,  it  must  be  observed,  had  simply  acted  on  his 
principle  that  the  question  between  slavery  and  freedom 
was  to  be  settled  by  local,  popular  choice  ;  he  claimed 
for  the  white  men  of  Kansas  the  fair  opportunity  of 
voting  ;  given  that,  he  persistently  declared,  "  I  do  no,t 
care  whether  slavery  be  voted  up  or  voted  down."  In\ 
Lincoln's  settled  opinion  this  moral  attitude  of  in 
difference  to  the  wrongfulness  of  slavery,  so  long  as 
respect  was  had  to  the  liberties  of  the  privileged  race, 
was,  so  to  say,  treason  to  the  basic  principle  of  the 


142  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

American  Commonwealth,  a  treason  which  had  steadily 
been  becoming  rife  and  upon  which  it  was  time  to  stamp. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  of  his  earnestness  about 
this.  But  the  Republican  leaders,  honourably  enough, 
regarded  this  as  an  unpractical  line  to  take,  and  indeed 
to  the  political  historian  this  is  the  most  crucial  question 
in  American  history.  Nobody  can  say  that  civil  war 
would  or  would  not  have  occurred  if  this  or  that  had 
been  done  a  little  differently,  but  Abraham  Lincoln,  at 
this  crisis  of  his  life,  did,  in  pursuance  of  his  peculiarly 
cherished  principle  forge  at  least  a  link  in  the  chain 
of  events  which  actually  precipitated  the  war.  And  he 
did  it  knowing  better  than  any  other  man  that  he  was 
doing  something  of  great  national  importance,  involving 
at  least  great  national  risk.  Was  he  pursuing  his 
principles,  moderate  as  they  were  in  the  original  con 
ception,  with  fanaticism,  or  at  the  best  preferring  a 
solemn  consistency  of  theory  to  the  conscientious 
handling  of  facts  not  reducible  to  theory  ?  As  a 
question  of  practical  statesmanship  in  the  largest  sense, 
how  did  matters  really  stand  in  regard  to  slavery  and 
to  the  relations  between  South  and  North,  and  what 
was  Lincoln's  idea  of  "  putting  slavery  back  where  the 
fathers  placed  it  "  really  worth  ? 

Herndon  in  these  days  went  East  to  try  and  enlist 
the  support  of  the  great  men  for  Lincoln.  He  found 
them  friendly  but  immovable.  Editor  Horace  Greeley 
said  to  him  :  "  The  Republican  standard  is  too  high  ; 
we  want  something  practical."  This,  we  may  be  pretty 
sure,  stiffened  Lincoln's  back,  as  a  man  with  a  cause 
that  he  cared  for,  and,  for  that  matter,  as  a  really 
shrewd  manager  in  a  party  which  he  thought  stood  for 
something.  It  reveals  the  flabbiness  which  the  North 
erners  were  in  danger  of  making  a  governing  tradition 
of  policy.  The  wrongfulness  of  any  extension  of  slavery 
might  be  loudly  asserted  in  1854,  but  in  1858,  when  it 
no  longer  looked  as  if  so  great  an  extension  of  it  was 
really  imminent,  there  was  no  harm  in  shifting  towards 
some  less  provocative  principle  on  which  more  people 
at  the  moment  might  agree.  Confronted  with  Northern 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  143 

politicians  who  would  reason  in  this  fashion  stood  a 
united  South  whose  leaders  were  by  now  accustomed  to 
make  the  Union  Government  go  which  way  they  chose 
and  had  no  sort  of  disposition  to  compromise  their 
principle  in  the  least.  "  What,"  as  Lincoln  put  it  in 
an  address  given  not  long  after  his  contest  with  Douglas 
at  the  Cooper  Institute  in  New  York,  "  what  do  you 
think  will  content  the  South  ?  "  "  Nothing,"  he 
answered,  "  but  an  acknowledgment  that  slavery  is 
right."  "  Holding  as  they  do  that  slavery  is  morally 
right  and  socially  elevating,  they  cannot  cease  to 
demand  a  full  national  recognition  of  it,  as  a  legal  right 
and  a  social  blessing.  Nor  can  we  justifiably  withhold 
this  on  any  ground,  save  our  conviction  that  slavery  is 
wrong."  That  being  so,  there  was  no  use,  he  said,  in 
"  groping  about  for  some  middle  ground  between  right 
and  wrong,"  or  in  "  a  policy  of  '  don't  care  '  on  a 
question  about  which  all  true  men  do  care."  And 
there  is  ample  evidence  that  he  understood  rightly  the 
policy  of  the  South.  It  is  very  doubtful  whether  any 
large  extension  of  cultivation  by  slave  labour  was 
economically  possible  in  Kansas  or  in  regions  yet 
further  North,  but  we  have  seen  to  what  lengths  the 
Southern  leaders  would  go  in  the  attempt  to  secure 
even  a  limited  recognition  of  slavery  as  lawful  in  a  new 
State.  They  were  not  succeeding  in  the  business  of  the 
Kansas  Constitution.  But  they  had  a  very  good  pros 
pect  of  a  far  more  important  success.  The  celebrated 
dicta  of  Chief  Justice  Taney  and  other  judges  in  the 
Dred  Scott  case  had  not  amounted  to  an  actual  decision, 
nor  if  they  had  would  a  single  decision  have  been 
irreversible.  Whether  the  principle  of  them  should 
become  fixed  in  American  Constitutional  law  depended 
(though  this  could  not  be  openly  said)  on  whether 
future  appointments  to  the  Supreme  Court  were  to  be 
made  by  a  President  who  shared  Taney's  views ;  whether 
the  executive  action  of  the  President  was  governed  by 
the  same  views  ;  and  on  the  subtle  pressure  which  outside 
opinion  does  exercise,  and  in  this  case  had  surely 
exercised,  upon  judicial  minds,  If  the  simple  principle 


144  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

that  the  right  to  a  slave  is  just  one  form  of  the  ordinary 
right  to  property  once  became  firmly  fixed  in  American 
jurisprudence  it  is  hard  to  see  how  any  laws  prohibiting 
slavery  could  have  continued  to  be  held  constitutional 
except  in  States  which  were  free  States  when  the 
Constitution  was  adopted.  Of  course,  a  State  like  New 
York  where  slaves  were  industrially  useless  would  not 
therefore  have  been  filled  with  slave  plantations,  but, 
among  a  loyally  minded  people,  the  tradition  which 
reprobated  slavery  would  have  been  greatly  weakened. 
The  South  would  have  been  freed  from  the  sense  that 
slavery  was  a  doomed  institution.  If  attempts  to 
plant  slavery  further  in  the  West  with  profit  failed, 
there  was  Cuba  and  there  was  Central  America,  on  which 
filibustering  raids  already  found  favour  in  the  South, 
and  in  which  the  national  Government  might  be  led 
to  adopt  schemes  of  conquest  or  annexation.  Moreover, 
it  was  avowed  by  leaders  like  Jefferson  Davis  that 
though  it  might  be  impracticable  to  hope  for  the  repeal 
of  the  prohibition  of  the  slave  trade,  at  least  some 
relaxation  of  its  severity  ought  to  be  striven  for,  in  the 
interest  of  Texas  and  New  Mexico  and  of  possible  future 
Territories  where  there  might  be  room  for  more  slaves. 
Such  were  the  views  of  the  leaders  whose  influence 
preponderated  with  the  present  President  and  in  the 
main  with  the  present  Congress.  When  Lincoln  judged 
that  a  determined  stand  against  their  policy  was 
required,  and  further  that  no  such  stand  could  be 
possible  to  a  party  which  had  embraced  Douglas  with 
his  principle,  "  I  care  not  whether  slavery  be  voted  up 
or  voted  down,"  there  is  no  doubt  now  that  he  was 
right  and  the  great  body  of  Republican  authority  opposed 
to  him  wrong.  / 

When  Lincoln  and  his  friends  in  Illinois  determined  \ 
to  fight  Douglas,  it  became  impossible  for  the  Re 
publican  party  as  a  whole  to  fall  far  behind  them.  This 
was  in  itself  at  that  crisis  an  important  thing.  Lincoln 
added  greatly  to  its  importance  by  the  opening  words  in 
the  first  speech  of  his  campaign.  They  were  the  most 
carefully  prepared  words  that  he  had  yet  spoken,  and 


THE   RISE  OF  LINCOLN  145 

the  most  momentous  that  he  had  spoken  till  now  or 
perhaps  ever  spoke.  There  is  nothing  in  them  for 
which  what  has  been  said  of  the  situation  and  of  his 
views  will  not  have  prepared  us,  and  nothing  which 
thousands  of  men  might  not  have  said  to  one  another 
in  private  for  a  year  or  two  before.  But  the  first  public 
avowal  by  a  responsible  man  in  trenchant  phrase,  that 
a  grave  issue  has  been  joined  upon  which  one  party 
or  the  other  must  accept  entire  defeat,  may  be  an  events 
of  great  and  perilous  consequence. 

He  said  :  "  If  we  could  first  know  where  we  are  and 
whither  we  are  tending,  we  could  better  judge  what  to 
do  and  how  to  do  it.  We  are  now  far  into  the  fifth  year 
since  a  policy  was  initiated  with  the  avowed  object,  and 
confident  promise,  of  putting  an  end  to  slavery  agitation. 
Under  the  operation  of  that  policy,  that  agitation  has 
not  only  not  ceased,  but  has  constantly  augmented.  In 
my  opinion  it  will  not  cease  until  a  crisis  shall  have 
been  reached  and  passed.  c  A  house  divided  against 
itself  cannot  stand.'  I  believe  this  Government  cannot 
endure  permanently  half  slave  and  half  free.  I  do  not 
expect  ;the  Union  to  be  dissolved — I  do  not  expect  the 
house  to  fall — but  I  do  expect  that  it  will  cease  to  be 
divided.  It  will  become  all  one  thing  or  all  the  other. 
Either  the  opponents  of  slavery  will  arrest  the  further 
spread  of  it,  and  place  it  where  the  public  mind  shall 
rest  in  the  belief  that  it  is  in  course  of  ultimate  extinction ; 
or  its  advocates  will  push  it  forward  till  it  shall  become 
lawful  alike  in  all  the  States,  old  as  well  as  new — 
North  as  well  as  South." 

\  It  may  perhaps  be  said  that  American  public  opinion 
has  in  the  past  been  very  timid  in  facing  clear  cut 
issues.  But,  as  has  already  been  observed,  an  apt 
phrase  crystallising  the  unspoken  thought  of  many  is 
even  more  readily  caught  up  in  America  than  anywhere 
else ;  so,  though  but  few  people  in  States  at  a  distance 
paid  much  attention  to  the  rest  of  the  debates,  or  for 
a  while  again  to  Lincoln ,-  the  comparison  of  the  house 
divided  against  itself  produced  an  effect  in  the  country 
which  did  not  wear  out.  In  this  whole  passage,  more- 


146  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

over,  Lincoln  had  certainly  formulated  the  question 
before  the  nation  more  boldly,  more  clearly,  more  truly 
than  any  one  before.  It  is  impossible  to  estimate  such 
influences  precisely,  but  this  was  among  thg^ -speeches 
that  rankjas  important  actions,  and  the  story,  most 
cKa^ctensttc  of  tKe^spealSF,  which  lay  behind  it,  is 
worth  relating  in  detail.  Lincoln  had  actually  in  a 
speech  in  1856  declared  that  the  United  States  could  not 
long  endure  half  slave  and  half  free.  "  What  in  God's 
name,"  said  some  friend  after  the  meeting,  "  could 
induce  you  to  promulgate  such  an  opinion  ?  "  "  Upon 
my  soul,"  he  said,  "  I  think  it  is  true,"  and  he  could  not 
be  argued  out  of  this  opinion.  Finally  the  friend  pro 
tested  that,  true  or  not,  no  good  could  come  of 
spreading  this  opinion  abroad,  and  after  grave  reflection 
Lincoln  promised  not  to  utter  it  again  for  the  present. 
Now,  in  1858,  having  prepared  his  speech  he  read  it  to 
Herndon.  Herndon  questioned  whether  the  passage  on 
the  divided  house  was  politic.  Lincoln  said  :  "  I  would 
rather  be  defeated  with  this  expression  in  my  speech, 
and  uphold  and  discuss  it  before  the  people,  than  be 
victorious  without  it."  Once  more,  just  before  he 
delivered  it,  he  read  it  over  to  a  dozen  or  so  of  his  closest 
supporters,  for  it  was  his  way  to  discuss  his  intentions 
fully  with  friends,  sometimes  accepting  their  advice 
most  submissively  and  sometimes  disregarding  it  wholly. 
One  said  it  was  "  ahead  of  its  time,"  another  that  it 
was  a  "  damned  fool  utterance."  All  more  or  less 
strongly  condemned  it,  except  this  time  Herndon,  who, 
according  to  his  recollection,  said,  "  It  will  make  you 
President."  He  listened  to  all  and  then  addressed  them, 
we  are  told,  substantially  as  follows :  "  Friends,  this  thing 
has  been  retarded  long  enough.  The  time  has  come  when 
these  sentiments  shoujd  be  uttered ;  and  if  it  is  decreed 
that  I  should  go  down  because  of  this  speech,  then  let  me 
go  down  linked  to  the  truth — let  me  die  in  the  advocacy  of 
what  is  j ust  and  right."  Rather  a  memorable  pronounce 
ment  of  a  candidate  -to  his  committee  ;  and  the  man 
who  records  it  is  insistent  upon  every  little  illustration  he 
can  find  both  of  Lincoln's  cunning  and  of  his  ambition. 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  147 

Lincoln  did  go  down  in  this  particular  contest.     Many  j 
friends  wrote  and  reproved  him  after  this  "  damned  j 
fool    utterance,"    but    his    defeat    was    not,    after   all, 
attributed  to  that.     All  the  same  he  did  himself  ensure 
his  defeat,  and  he  did  it  with  extraordinary  skill,  forj 
the  purpose  of  ensuring  that  the  next  President  should 
be  a  Republican  President,  though  it  is  impossible  he 
should  at  that  time  have  counted  upon  being  himself, 
that  Republican.     Each  candidate  had  undertaken  to 
answer  set  questions  which  his  opponent  might  pro 
pound  to  him.     And  great  public  attention  was  paid  to 
the  answers  to  these  interrogatories.     The  Dred  Scott 
judgments  created  a  great  difficulty  for  Douglas  ;    he' 
was  bound  to  treat  them  as  right;  but  if  they  were) 
tright  and  Congress  had  no  power  to  prohibit  slavery  inl 
la  Territory,  neither  could  a  Territorial  Legislature  with! 
/  authority  delegated  by  Congress  have  that  power ;  and,  I 
i  if  this  were  made  clear,  it  would  seem  there  was  an  end  I 
1  of  that  free  choice  of   the  people  in  the  Territories  of  I 
\  which  Douglas  had  been  the  great  advocate.     Douglas 
would  use  all  his  evasive  skill  in  keeping  away  from  this 
difficult  point.     If,  however,  he  could  be  forced  to  face 
it  Lincoln  knew  what  he  would  say.     He  would  say 
that    slavery    would    not    be    actually    unlawful    in    a 
Territory,  but  would  never  actually  exist  in  it  if  the 
Territorial   Legislature   chose   to  abstain,  as   it  could, 
from  passing  any  of  the  laws  which  would  in  practice  be 
necessary  to   protect   slave   property.     By  advocating 
this   view  Douglas  would   fully  reassure   those   of  his 
former  supporters  in   Illinois  who  puzzled  themselves 
on  the  Dred   Scott  case,   but  he  would  infuriate   the 
South.     Lincoln  determined  to  force  Douglas  into  this 
position  by  the  questions  which  he  challenged  him  to 
answer.     When  he  told  his  friends  of  his  ambition,  they 
all  told  him  he  would  lose  his  election.     "  Gentlemen," 
said  Lincoln,  "  I  am  killing  larger  game  ;    if  Douglas 
answers,  he  can  never  be  President,  and  the  battle  of 
1860   is  worth  a   hundred   of   this."     The   South  was 
already  angry  with  Douglas   for  his   action   over  the 
Kansas    Constitution,    but    he    would    have    been    an 


148  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

invincible  candidate  for  the  South  to  support  in  1860, 
and  it  must  have  told  in  his  favour  that  his  offence  then 
had  been  one  of  plain  honesty.  But  in  this  fresh  offence 
the  Southern  leaders  had  some  cause  to  accuse  him  of 
double  dealing,  and  they  swore  he  should  not  be  President. 
A  majority  of  the  new  Illinois  Legislature  returned 
Douglas  to  the  Senate.  Lincoln,  however,  had  an 
actual  majority  of  the  votes  of  the  whole  State. 
Probably  also  he  had  gained  a  hold  on  Illinois  for  the 
future  out  of  all  proportion  to  the  actual  number  of 
votes  then  given  against  the  popular  Douglas,  and 
above  all  he  had  gathered  to  him  a  band  of  supporters 
who  had  unbounded  belief  in  him.  But  his  fall  for  the 
moment  was  little  noticed  or  regretted  outside  Illinois, 
or  at  any  rate  in  the  great  Eastern  States,  to  which 
Illinois  was,  so  to  speak,  the  provinces  and  he  a  provincial 
attorney.  His  first  words  in  the  campaign  had  made  a 
stir,  but  the  rest  of  his  speeches  in  these  long  debates 
could  not  be  much  noticed  at  a  distance.  Douglas 
had  won,  and  the  presumption  was  that  he  had  proved 
himself  the  better  man.  Lincoln  had  performed  what, 
apart  from  results,  was  a  work  of  intellectual  merits 
beyond  the  compass  of  any  American  statesman  since/ 
Hamilton  ;  moreover,  as  can  now  be  seen,  there  had 
been  great  results  ;  for,  first,  the  young  Republican 
party  had  not  capitulated  and  collapsed,  and,  then,  the 
great  Democratic  party,  established  in  power,  in  in 
difference,  and  in  complicity  with  wrong,  was  split 
clean  in  two.  But  these  were  not  results  that  could  be 
read  yet  awhile  in  election  figures.  Meanwhile  the 
exhausted  Lincoln  reconciled  himself  for  the  moment 
to  failure.  As  a  private  man  he  was  thoroughly  content 
that  he  could  soon  work  off  his  debt  for  his  election 
expenses,  could  earn  about  £500  a  year,  and  be  secure 
in  the  possession  of  the  little  house  and  the  £2,000  capital 
which  was  "  as  much  as  any  man  ought  to  have."  As  a 
public  man  he  was  sadly  proud  that  he  had  at  least 
"  said  some  words  which  may  bear  fruit  after  I  am 
forgotten."  Persistent  melancholy  and  incurable  elas 
ticity  can  go  together,  and  they  make  a  very  strong 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  149 

combination.  The  tone  of  resignation  had  not  passed 
away  from  his  comparatively  intimate  letters  when 
he  was  writing  little  notes  to  one  political  acquaintance 
and  another  inciting  them  to  look  forward  to  the  fun 
of  the  next  fight. 

4.  John  Brown. 

For  the  next  few  months  the  excitements  of  the 
great  political  world  concern  this  biography  little. 
There  was  strife  between  Davis  and  Douglas  in  the 
Senate.  At  a  meeting  strong  against  slavery,  Seward 
regained  courage  from  the  occasion  and  roused  the 
North  with  grave  and  earnest  words  about  the  "  irre 
pressible  conflict."  The  "  underground  railway,"  or 
chain  of  friendly  houses  by  which  fugitive  slaves  were 
stealthily  passed  on  to  Canada,  became  famous. 
Methodist  professors  riotously  attempted  to  rescue  an 
arrested  fugitive  at  Oberlin.  A  Southern  grand  jury 
threw  out  the  bill  of  indictment  against  a  slave-trading 
crew  caught  red-handed.  In  California  Democrats 
belonging  to  what  was  nicknamed  "  the  chivalry," 
forced  upon  Senator  Broderick,  a  literally  democratic 
Irishman  and  the  bravest  of  the  Democrats  who  stood 
out  for  fair  treatment  to  Kansas,  a  duel  in  which  he 
might  fairly  be  said  to  have  been  murdered.  The  one 
event  which  demands  more  than  allusion  was  the  raid 
and  the  death  of  John  Brown. 

J®hn  Br©wn,  in  whom  Puritan  religion,  as  strict  as 
that  of  his  ancestors  en  the  M&yflezver,  put  forth 
gentler  beauties  of  character  than  his  sanguinary 
mission  may  suggest,  had  been  somewhat  •£  a  failure 
as  a  scientific  farmer,  but  as  a  leader  of  fighting  men  in 
desperate  adventure  only  such  men  as  Drake  or  Garibaldi 
seem  to  have  excelled  him.  More  particularly  in  the 
commotions  in  Kansas  he  had  led  forays,  slain  ruthlessly, 
witnessed  dry-eyed  the  deaths  of  several  of  his  tall, 
strong  sons,  and  as  a  rule  earned  success  by  cool  judg 
ment — all,  as  he  was  absolutely  sure,  at  the  clear  call  of 
God.  In  October,  1859 — how  and  with  whose  help  the 
stroke  was  prepared  seems  to  be  a  question  of  some 


150  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

mystery — John  Brown,  gathering  a  large  party  of 
Abolitionists  and  negroes,  invaded  the  slave  States  and 
seized  the  United  States  arsenal  at  Harper's  Ferry  in 
Virginia.  In  the  details,  which  do  not  matter,  of  this 
tiny  campaign,  John  Brown  seems,  for  the  first  time  in 
his  life,  to  have  blundered  badly.  This  was  the  only 
thing  that  lay  upon  his  conscience  towards  the  last. 
What  manner  of  success  he  can  have  expected  does  not 
appear  ;  most  likely  he  had  neither  care  nor  definite 
expectation  as  to  the  result.  The  United  States  troops 
under  Robert  Lee,  soon  to  be  famous,  of  course  overcame 
him  quickly.  One  of  his  prisoners  describes  how  he  held 
out  to  the  last ;  a  dead  son  beside  him ;  one  hand  on  the 
pulse  of  a  dying  son,  his  rifle  in  the  other.  He  was 
captured,  desperately  wounded.  Southerners  could  not 
believe  the  fact  that  Brown  had  not  contemplated  some 
hideous  uprising  of  slaves  against  their  wives  and  children, 
but  he  only  wished  to  conquer  them  with  the  sword  of 
the  Lord  and  of  Gideon,  quietly  freeing  slaves  as  he 
went.  So  naturally  there  was  talk  of  lynching,  but 
the  Virginian  gentlemen  concerned  would  not  have 
that.  Governor  Wise,  of  Virginia,  had  some  talk  with 
him  and  justified  his  own  high  character  rather  than 
Brown's  by  the  estimate  he  gave  of  him  in  a  speech  at 
Richmond.  Brown  was  hanged.  "  Stonewall  "  Jack 
son,  a  brother  fanatic,  if  that  is  the  word,  felt  the 
spectacle  "  awful,"  as  he  never  felt  slaughter  in  battle, 
and  "  put  up  a  prayer  that  if  possible  Brown  might  be 
saved."  "  So  perish  all  foes  of  the  human  race,"  said 
the  officer  commanding  on  the  occasion,  and  the  South 
generally  felt  the  like. 

A  little  before  his  death  Brown  was  asked  :  "  How  do 
you  justify  your  acts  ?  "  He  said  :  "  I  think,  my 
friend,  you  are  guilty  of  a  great  wrong  against  God  and 
humanity — I  say  it  without  wishing  to  be  offensive — 
and  it  would  be  perfectly  right  for  any  one  to  interfere 
with  you  so  far  as  to  free  those  you  wilfully  and  wickedly 
hold  in  bondage.  I  think  I  did  right,  and  that  others 
will  do  right  who  interfere  with  you  at  any  time  and 
at  all  times."  In  a  conversation  still  later,  he  is  reported 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  151 

to  have  concluded  :  "  I  wish  to  say  furthermore  that 
you  had  better — all  you  people  at  the  South — prepare 
yourselves  for  a  settlement  of  this  question,  that  must 
come  up  for  settlement  sooner  than  you  are  prepared 
for  it.  You  may  dispose  of  me  very  easily.  I  am  nearly 
disposed  of  now.  But  this  question  is  still  to  be  settled 
— this  negro  question  I  mean.  The  end  of  that  is 
not  yet."  To  a  friend  he  wrote  that  he  rejoiced  like 
Paul  because  he  knew  like  Paul  that  "  if  they  killed 
him,  it  would  greatly  advance  the  cause  of  Christ." 

Lincoln,  who  regarded  lawlessness  and  slavery  as  twin 
evils,  could  only  say  of  John  Brown's  raid  :  "  That 
affair,  in  its  philosophy,  corresponds  with  the  many 
attempts  related  in  history  at  the  assassination  of 
kings  and  emperors.  An  enthusiast  broods  over  the; 
oppression  of  a  people  till  he  fancies  himself  com 
missioned  by  Heaven  to  liberate  them.  He  ventures  the 
attempt,  which  ends  in  little  else  than  his  own  execution. 
Orsini's  attempt  on  Louis  Napoleon  and  John  Brown's 
attempt  at  Harper's  Ferry  were,  in  their  philosophy, 
precisely  the  same."  Seward,  it  must  be  recorded, 
spoke  far  more  sympathetically  of  him  than  Lincoln  ; 
and  far  more  justly,  for  there  is  a  flaw  somewhere  in 
this  example,  as  his  chief  biographer  regards  it,  of 
"  Mr.  Lincoln's  common-sense  judgment."  John  Brown 
had  at  least  left  to  every  healthy-minded  Northern 
boy  a  memory  worth  much  in  the  coming  years  of  war 
and,  one  hopes,  ever  after.  He  had  well  deserved  to 
be  the  subject  of  a  song  which,  whatever  may  be  its 
technical  merits  as  literature,  does  stir.  Emerson  took 
the  same  view  of  him  as  the  song  writer,  and  Victor 
Hugo  suggested  as  an  epitaph  for  him  :  "  Pro  Christo 
sicut  Christus."  A  calmer  poet,  Longfellow,  wrote  in 
his  diary  on  Friday,  December  2,  1859,  tne  day  wnen 
Brown  was  hanged  :  "  This  will  be  a  great  day  in  our 
history,  the  date  of  a  new  revolution,  quite  as  much 
needed  as  the  old  one.  Even  now,  as  I  write,  they  are 
leading  old  John  Brown  to  execution  in  Virginia  for 
attempting  to  rescue  slaves.  This  is  sowing  the  wind  to 
reap  the  whirlwind,  which  will  soon  come." 


iS2  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Any  one  who  is  interested  in  Lincoln  is  almost  forced 
to  linger  over  the  contrasting  though  slighter  character 
who  crossed  the  stage  just  before  he  suddenly  took  the 
principal  part  upon  it.  Men  like  John  Brown  may  be 
fitly  ranked  with  the  equally  rare  men  who,  steering  a 
very  different  course,  have  consistently  acted  out  the 
principles  of  the  Quakers,  constraining  no  man  whether 
by  violence  or  by  law,  yet  going  into  the  thick  of  life 
prepared  at  all  times  to  risk  all.  All  such  men  are 
abnormal  in  the  sense  that  most  men  literally  could  not 
put  life  through  on  any  similar  plan  and  would  be 
wrong  and  foolish  to  try.  The  reason  is  that  most  men 
have  a  wider  range  of  sympathy  and  of  intellect  than 
they.  But  the  common-sense  of  most  of  us  revolts 
from  any  attitude  of  condemnation  or  condescension 
towards  them  ;  for  they  are  more  disinterested  than  most 
of  us,  more  single-minded,  and  in  their  own  field  often 
more  successful.  With  a  very  clear  conscience  we  refuse 
to  take  example  from  these  men  whose  very  defects 
have  operated  in  them  as  a  special  call ;  but  undoubtedly 
most  of  us  regard  them  with  a  warmth  of  sympathy 
which  we  are  slow  to  accord  to  safer  guides.  We  turn 
now  from  John  Brown,  who  saw  in  slavery  a  great 
oppression,  and  was  very  angry,  and  went  ahead  slaying 
the  nearest  oppressor  and  liberating — for  some  days  at 
least — the  nearest  slave,  to  a  patient  being,  who,  long 
ago  in  his  youth,  had  boiled  with  anger  against  slavery, 
but  whose  whole  soul  now  expressed  itself  in  a  policy 
of  deadly  moderation  towards  it  :  "  Let  us  put  back 
slavery  where  the  fathers  placed  it,  and  there  let  it  rest 
in  peace."  We  are  to  study  how  he  acted  when  in 
power.  In  almost  every  department  of  policy  we  shall 
see  him  watching  and  waiting  while  blood  flows,  sus 
pending  judgment,  temporising,  making  trial  of  this 
expedient  and  of  that,  adopting  in  the  end,  without 
thanks,  the  measure  of  which  most  men  will  say,  when 
it  succeeds,  "  That  is  what  we  always  said  should  be 
done."  Above  all,  in  that  point  of  policy  which  most 
interests  us,  we  shall  witness  the  long  postponement  of 
the  blow  that  killed  negro  slavery,  the  steady  sub- 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  153 

ordination  of  this  particular  issue  to  what  will  not  at 
once  appeal  to  us  as  a  larger  and  a  higher  issue.  All 
this  provoked  at  the  time  in  many  excellent  and  clever 
men  dissatisfaction  and  deep  suspicion ;  they  longed  for  a 
leader  whose  heart  visibly  glowed  with  a  sacred  passion  ; 
they  attributed  his  patience,  the  one  quality  of  greatness 
which  after  a  while  everybody  might  have  discerned  in 
him,  not  to  a  self-mastery  which  almost  passed  belief,/ 
but  to  a  tepid  disposition  and  a  mediocre  if  not  a  lowj 
level  of  desire.  We  who  read  of  him  to-day  shall  not\ 
escape  our  moments  of  lively  sympathy  with  these 
grumblers  of  the  time  ;  we  shall  wish  that  this  man 
could  ever  plunge,  that  he  could  ever  see  red,  ever 
commit  some  passionate  injustice  ;  we  shall  suspect  him 
of  being,  in  the  phrase  of  a  great  philosopher,  "  a 
disgustingly  well-regulated  person,"  lacking  that  in 
definable  quality  akin  to  the  honest  passions  of  us 
ordinary  men,  but  deeper  and  stronger,  which  alone 
could  compel  and  could  reward  any  true  reverence  for 
his  memory.  These  moments  will  recur  but  they  cannot 
last.  A  thousand  little  things,  apparent  on  the  surface 
but  deeply  significant ;  almost  every  trivial  anecdote  of 
his  boyhood, .his  prime,  or  his  closing  years;  his  few 
recorded  confidences  ;  his  equally  few  speeches  made 
under  strong  emotion  ;  the  lineaments  of  his  face 
described  by  observers  whom  photography  corroborated  ; 
all  these  absolutely  forbid  any  conception  of  Abraham 
Lincoln  as  a  worthy  commonplace  person  fortunately 
fitted  to  the  requirements  of  his  office  at  the  moment, 
or  as  merely  a  "  good  man  "  in  the  negative  and  dis 
paraging  sense  to  which  that  term  is  often  wrested. 
It  is  really  evident  that  there  were  no  frigid  perfections 
about  him  at  all ;  indeed  the  weakness  of  some  parts  of 
his  conduct  are  so  unlike  what  seems  to  be  required  of  a 
successful  ruler  that  it  is  certain  some  almost  unexampled 
quality  of  heart  and  mind  went  to  the  doing  of  what  he 
did.  There  is  no  need  to  define  that  quality.  The 
general  wisdom  of  his  statesmanship  will  perhaps  appear 
greater  and  its  not  infrequent  errors  less  the  more  fully 
the  circumstances  are  appreciated.  As  to_the  man, 


iS4  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

perhaps-the,  sense  will  grow  upon  us  that  this  balanced 
and  calculating  person^.with  his  finger  on  the  pulse  of 
the  electorate  while  he  cracked  his  uncensored  jests 
with  all  comers,  did  of  set  purpose  drink  and  refill  and 
drink  again  as  full  and  fiery  a  cup  of  sacrifice  as  ever 
was  pressed  to  the  lips  of  hero  or  of  saint. 

5.  The  Election  of  Lincoln. 

Unlooked  for  events  were  now  raising  Lincoln  to  the 
highest  place  which  his  ambition  could  contemplate. 
His  own  action  in  the  months  that  followed  his  defeat 
by  Douglas  cannot  have  contributed  much  to  his 
surprising  elevation,  yet  it  illustrates  well  his  strength 
and  his  weakness,  his  real  fitness,  now  and  then 
startlingly  revealed,  for  the  highest  position,  and  the 
superficial  unfitness  which  long  hid  his  capacity  from 
many  acute  contemporaries. 

In  December,  1859,  he  made  a  number  of  speeches  in 
Kansas  and  elsewhere  in  the  West,  and  in  February, 
1 860,  he  gave  a  memorable  address  in  the  Cooper  Institute 
in  New  York  before  as  consciously  intellectual  an 
audience  as  could  be  collected  in  that  city,  proceeding 
afterwards  to  speak  in  several  cities  of  New  England. 
His  appearance  at  the  Cooper  Institute,  in  particular, 
was  a  critical  venture,  and  he  knew  it.  There  was 
natural  curiosity  about  this  untutored  man  from  the 
West.  An  exaggerated  report  of  his  wit  prepared  the 
way  for  probable  disappointment.  The  surprise  which 
awaited  his  hearers  was  of  a  different  kind  ;  they  were 
prepared  for  a  florid  Western  eloquence  offensive  to 
ears  which  were  used  to  a  less  spontaneous  turgidity  ; 
they  heard  instead  a  speech  with  no  ornament  at  all, 
whose  only  beauty  was  that  it  was  true  and  that  the 
speaker  felt  it.  The  single  flaw  in  the  Cooper  Institute 
speech  has  already  been  cited,  the  narrow  view  of 
Western  respectability  as  to  John  Brown.  For  the 
rest,  this  speech,  dry  enough  in  a  sense,  is  an  incom 
parably  masterly  statement  of  the  then  political  situation, 
reaching  from  its  far  back  origin  to  the  precise  and 
definite  question  requiring  decision  at  that  moment. 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  155 

Mr.  Choate,  who  as  a  young  man  was  present,  set  down 
of  late  years  his  vivid  recollection  of  that  evening. 
"  He  appeared  in  every  sense  of  the  word  like  one  of 
the  plain  people  among  whom  he  loved  to  be  counted. 
At  first  sight  there  was  nothing  impressive  or  imposing 
about  him  ;  his  clothes  hung  awkwardly  on  his  giant 
frame  ;  his  face  was  of  a  dark  pallor  without  the 
slightest  tinge  of  colour  ;  his  seamed  and  rugged  features 
bore  the  furrows  of  hardship  and  struggle  ;  his  deep  set 
eyes  looked  sad  and  anxious  ;  his  countenance  in  repose 
gave  little  evidence  of  the  brilliant  power  which  raised 
him  from  the  lowest  to  the  highest  station  among  his 
countrymen  ;  as  he  talked  to  me  before  the  meeting  he 
seemed  ill  at  ease."  We  know,  as  a  fact,  that  among 
his  causes  of  apprehension,  he  was  for  the  first  time' 
painfully  conscious  of  those  clothes.  "  When  he  spoke," 
proceeds  Mr.  Choate,  "  he  was  transformed  ;  his  eye 
kindled,  his  voice  rang,  his  face  shone  and  seemed  to 
light  up  the  whole  assembly.  For  an  hour  and  a  half 
he  held  his  audience  in  the  hollow  of  his  hand.  His 
style  of  speech  and  manner  of  delivery  were  severely 
simple.  What  Lowell  called  *  the  grand  simplicities  of 
the  Bible,'  with  which  he  was  so  familiar,  were  reflected 
in  his  discourse.  ...  It  was  marvellous  to  see  how 
this  untutored  man,  by  mere  self-discipline  and  the 
chastening  of  his  own  spirit,  had  outgrown  all  mere 
tricious  arts,  and  found  his  way  to  the  grandeur  and 
strength  of  absolute  simplicity." 

The  newspapers  of  the  day  after  this  speech  confirm 
these  reverent  reminiscences.  On  this,  his  first  intro 
duction  to  the  cultivated  world  of  the  East,  Lincoln's 
audience  were  at  the  moment  and  for  the  moment 
conscious  of  the  power  which  he  revealed.  The  Cooper 
Institute  speech  takes  the  plain  principle  that  slavery 
is  wrong,  and  draws  the  plain  inference  that  it  is  idle  to 
seek  for  common  ground  with  men  who  say  it  is  right. 
Strange  but  tragically  frequent  examples  show  how  rare 
it  is  for  statesmen  in  times  of  crisis  to  grasp  the  essential 
truth  so  simply.  It  is  creditable  to  the  leading  men  of 
New  York  that  they  recognised  a  speech  which  just  at 


1 56  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

that  time  urged  this  plain  thing  in  sufficiently  plain 
language  as  a  very  great  speech,  and  had  an  inkling  of 
great  and  simple  qualities  in  the  man  who  made  it. 
It  is  not  specially  discreditable  that  very  soon  and  for 
a  long  while  part  of  them,  or  of  those  who  were  in 
fluenced  by  their  report,  reverted  to  their  former 
prejudices  in  regard  to  Lincoln.  When  they  saw  him 
thrust  by  election  managers  into  the  Presidency,  very 
few  indeed  of  what  might  be  called  the  better  sort 
believed,  or  could  easily  learn,  that  his  great  qualities 
were  great  enough  to  compensate  easily  for  the  many 
things  he  lacked.  This  specially  grotesque  specimen  of 
the  wild  West  was  soon  seen  not  to  be  of  the  charlatan 
type  ;  as  a  natural  alternative  he  was  assumed  to  be 
something  of  a  simpleton.  Many  intelligent  men 
retained  this  view  of  him  throughout  the  years  of  his 
trial,  and,  only  when  his  triumph  and  tragic  death  set 
going  a  sort  of  Lincoln  myth,  began  to  recollect  that 
"  I  came  to  love  and  trust  him  even  before  I  knew  him," 
or  the  like.  A  single  speech  like  this  at  the  Cooper 
Institute  might  be  enough  to  show  a  later  time  that 
Lincoln  was  a  man  of  great  intellect,  but  it  could  really 
do  little  to  prepare  men  in  the  East  for  what  they  next 
heard  of  him. 

Already  a  movement  was  afoot  among  his  friends  in 
Illinois  to  secure  his  nomination  for  the  Presidency  at 
the  Convention  of  the  Republican  party  which  was  to 
be  held  in  Chicago  in  May.  Before  that  Convention 
could  assemble  it  had  become  fairly  certain  that 
whoever  might  be  chosen  as  the  Republican  candidate 
would  be  President  of  the  United  States,  and  signs  were 
not  wanting  that  he  would  be  faced  with  grave  peril  to 
the  Union.  For  the  Democratic  party,  which  had  met 
in  Convention  at  Charleston  in  April,  had  proceeded  to 
split  into  two  sections,  Northern  and  Southern.  This 
memorable  Convention  was  a  dignified  assembly  gathered 
in  a  serious  mood  in  a  city  of  some  antiquity  and  social 
charm.  From  the  first,  however,  a  latent  antipathy 
between  the  Northern  and  the  Southern  delegates  made 
itself  felt.  The  Northerners,  predisposed  to  a  certain 


THE   RISE  OF  LINCOLN  157 

deference  towards  the  South  and  prepared  to  appreciate 
its  graceful  hospitality,  experienced  an  uneasy  sense 
that  they  were  regarded  as  social  inferiors.  Worse 
trouble  than  this  appeared  when  the  Convention  met 
for  its  first  business,  the  framing  of  the  party  platform. 
Whether  the  position  which  Lincoln  had  forced  Douglas 
to  take  up  had  precipitated  this  result  or  not,  dissension 
between  Northern  and  Southern  Democrats  on  the 
subject  of  slavery  had  already  manifested  itself  in 
Congress,  and  in  the  party  Convention  the  division 
became  irreparable.  Douglas,  it  will  be  remembered, 
had  started  with  the  principle  that  slavery  in  the 
Territories  formed  a  question  for  the  people  of  each 
territory  to  decide  ;  he  had  felt  bound  to  accept  the 
doctrine  underlying  the  Dred  Scott  judgments,  according 
to  which  slavery  was  by  the  Constitution  lawful  in  all 
territories  ;  pressed  by  Lincoln,  he  had  tried  to  reconcile 
his  original  position  with  this  doctrine  by  maintaining 
that  while  slavery  was  by  the  Constitution  lawful  in 
every  territory  it  was  nevertheless  lawful  for  a  Territorial 
Legislature  to  make  slave-owning  practically  impossible. 
In  framing  a  declaration  of  the  party  principles  as  to 
slavery  the  Southern  delegates  in  the  Democratic 
Convention  aimed  at  meeting  this  evasion.  With 
considerable  show  of  logic  they  asserted,  in  the  party 
platform  which  they  proposed,  not  merely  the  abstract 
rightfulness  and  lawfulness  of  slavery,  but  the  duty  of 
Congress  itself  to  make  any  provision  that  might  be 
necessary  to  protect  it  in  the  Territories.  To  this  the 
Northern  majority  of  the  delegates  could  not  consent  ; 
they  carried  an  amendment  declaring  merely  that  they 
would  abide  by  any  decision  of  the  Supreme  Court  as  to 
slavery.  Thereupon  the  delegates,  not  indeed  of  the 
whole  South  but  of  all  the  cotton-growing  States  except 
Georgia,  withdrew  from  the  Convention.  The  remaining 
delegates  were,  under  the  rules  of  the  Convention,  too 
few  to  select  a  candidate  for  the  Presidency,  and  the 
Convention  adjourned,  to  re-assemble  at  Baltimore  in 
June.  Eventually,  after  attempts  at  reunion  and 
further  dissensions,  two  separate  Democratic  Conven- 


158  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

tions  at  Baltimore,  a  Northern  and  a  Southern,  nomi 
nated,  as  their  respective  candidates,  Stephen  Douglas, 
the  obvious  choice  with  whom,  if  the  Southerners  had 
cared  to  temporise  further,  a  united  Democratic  party 
could  have  swept  the  polls,  and  John  C.  Breckinridge  of 
Kentucky,  a  gentleman  not  otherwise  known  than  as 
the  standard  bearer  on  this  great  occasion  of  the  un 
disguised  and  unmitigated  claims  of  the  slave-owners. 

Thus  it  was  that  the  American  Democratic  party 
forfeited  power  for  twenty-four  years,  divided  between 
the  consistent  maintenance  of  a  paradox  and  the 
adroit  maintenance  of  inconsistency.  Another  party  in 
this  election  demands  a  moment's  notice.  A  Convention 
of  delegates,  claiming  to  represent  the  old  Whigs,  met 
also  at  Baltimore  and  declared  merely  that  it  stood  for 
"  the  Constitution  of  the  country,  the  union  of  the 
States,  and  the  enforcement  of  the  laws."  They 
nominated  for  the  Presidency  John  Bell  of  Tennessee, 
and  for  the  Vice-Presidency  Edward  Everett.  This 
latter  gentleman  was  afterwards  chosen  as  the  orator 
of  the  day  at  the  ceremony  on  the  battlefield  of  Gettys 
burg  when  Lincoln's  most  famous  speech  was  spoken. 
He  was  a  travelled  man  and  a  scholar  ;  he  was  Senator 
of.  State  for  a  little  while  under  Fillmore,  and  dealt 
honestly  and  firmly  with  the  then  troublous  question  of 
Cuba.  His  orations  deserve  to  be  looked  at,  for  they 
are  patterns  of  the  artificial  eloquence  which  American 
taste  still  applauded,  and  as  such  they  help  to  show  the 
originality  of  Lincoln's  true  and,  in  a  sense,  unlaboured 
diction.  In  justice  to  the  Whigs,  let  it  be  noted  that 
they  declared  for  the  maintenance  of  the  Union, 
committing  themselves  with  decision  on  the  question  of 
the  morrow";  but  it  was  a  singular  platform  that 
resolutely  and  totally  ignored  the  only  issue  of  the-  day. 
Few  politicians  can  really  afford  to  despise  either  this 
conspicuously  foolish  attempt  to  overcome  a  difficulty 
by  shutting  one's  eyes  to  it,  or  the  more  plausible 
proposal  of  the  Northern  Democrats  to  continue 
temporising  with  a  movement  for  slavery  in  which 
they  were  neither  bold  enough  nor  corrupted  enough 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  159 

to  join.  The  consequences,  now  known  to  us,  of  a 
determined  stand  against  the  advance  of  slavery  were 
instinctively  foreseen  by  these  men,  and  they  cannot 
be  blamed  for  shrinking  from  them.  Yet  the  historian 
now,  knowing  that  those  consequences  exceeded  in 
terror  all  that  could  have  been  foreseen,  can  only 
agree  with  the  judgment  expressed  by  Lincoln  in  one  of 
his  Kansas  speeches  :  "  We  want  and  must  have  a 
national  policy  as  to  slavery  which  deals  with  it  as 
being  a  wrong.  Whoever  would  prevent  slavery  be- 
'  coming  national  and  perpetual  yields  all  when  he  yields 
to  a  policy  which  treats  it  either  as  being  right,  or  as 
being  a  matter  of  indifference."  The  Republican  party 
had  been  founded  upon  just  this  opinion.  Electoral 
victory  was  now  being  prepared  for  it,  not  because 
a  majority  was  likely  yet  to  take  so  resolute  a  view,  but 
because  its  effective  opponents  were  divided  between 
those  who  had  gone  the  length  of  calling  slavery  right 
and  those  who  strove  to  treat  it  as  indifferent.  The 
fate  of  America  may  be  said  to  have  depended  in  the 
early  months  of  1860  on  whether  the  nominee  of  the 
Republican  party  was  a  man  who  would  maintain  its 
principles  with  irresolution,  or  with  obstinacy,  or  with 
firm  moderation. 

When  it  had  first  been  suggested  to  Lincoln  in  the\ 
course  of  1859  that  he  might  be  that  nominee  he  said, 
"  I  do  not  think  myself  fit  for  the  Presidency."  This 
was  probably  his  sincere  opinion  at  the  moment,  though 
perhaps  the  moment  was  one  of  dejection.  In  any 
case  his  opinion  soon  changed,  and  though  it  is  not 
clear  whether  he  encouraged  his  friends  to  bring  his 
name  forward,  we  know  in  a  general  way  that  when 
they  decided  to  do  so  he  used  every  effort  of  his  own 
to  help  them.  We  must  accept  without  reserve 
Herndon's  reiterated  assertion  that  Lincoln  was  in 
tensely  ambitious  ;  and,  if  ambition  means  the  eager 
desire  for  great  opportunities,  the  depreciation  of  it, 
which  has  long  been  a  commonplace  of  literature,  and 
which  may  be  traced  back  to  the  Epicureans,  is  a  piece 
of  cant  which  ought  to  be  withdrawn  from  currency, 


160  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

and  ambition,  commensurate  with  the  powers  which 
each  man  can  discover  in  himself,  should  be  frankly 
recognised  as  a  part  of  Christian  duty.     In  judging  him 
to  be  the  best  man  for  the  Presidency,  Lincoln's  Illinois 
friends  and  he  himself  formed  a  very  sensible  judgment,! 
but    they   did    so    in    flagrant    contradiction    to    many 
superficial  appearances.     This  candidate   for  the  chief 
magistracy  at  a  critical  time  of  one  of  the  great  nations 
of  the  world   had  never  administered  any  concern  much 
larger  than  that  post  office  that  he  once  "  carried  around 
in   his   hat."     Of  the   several   other  gentlemen  whose 
names    were    before    the    party    there    was    none    who 
might  not  seem  greatly  to  surpass  him  in  experience  of 
affairs.     To    one    of    them,    Seward,    the    nomination 
seemed  to  belong  almost  of  right.     Chase  and  Seward 
both  were .  known  and  dignified  figures  in  that  great 
assembly  the  Senate.     Chase  was  of  proved  rectitude 
and  courage,  Seward  of  proved  and  very  considerable 
ability.     Chase  had  been  Governor  of  Ohio,  Seward  of 
New  York  State  ;    and  the  position  of  Governor  in  a 
State — a  State  it  must  be  remembered  is  independent 
in  almost  the  whole  of  what  we  call  domestic  politics — 
is  strictly  analogous  to  the  position  of  President  in  the 
Union,   and,  especially  in  a  great   State,  is   the   best 
training  ground  for  the  Presidency.     But  beyond  this, 
Seward,  between  whom  and  Lincoln  the  real  contest 
lay,    had    for    some    time    filled    a    recognised    though 
unofficial  position  as  the  leader  of  his  party.     He  had 
failed,  as  has  been  seen  in  his  dealings  with  Douglas, 
in  stern  insistence  upon  principle,  but  the  failure  was 
due  rather  to  his  sanguine  and  hopeful  temper  than  to 
lack  of  courage.     On  the  whole  from  the  time  when  he 
first  stood  up  against  Webster  in  the  discussions  of  1850, 
when  Lincoln  was  both  silent  and  obscure,  he  had  earned 
his  position  well.     Hereafter,  as  Lincoln's  subordinate, 
he  was  to  do  his  country  first-rate  service,  and  to  earn 
a  pure  fame  as  the  most  generously  loyal  subordinate  to 
a  chief  whom  he  had  thought  himself  fit  to  command. 
We  happen  to  have  ample  means  of  estimating  now  all 
Lincoln's  Republican  competitors  ;   we  know  that  none 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  161 

of  the  rest  were  equal  to  Seward  ;  and  we  know  that 
Seward  himself,  if  he  had  had  his  way,  would  have 
brought  the  common  cause  to  ruin.  Looking  back 
now  at  the  comparison  which  Lincoln,  when  he  entered 
into  the  contest,  must  have  drawn  between  himself 
and  Seward — for  of  the  rest  we  need  not  take  account — 
we  can  see  that  to  himself  at  least  and  some  few  in 
Illinois  he  had  now  proved  his  capacities,  and  that  in 
Seward's  public  record,  more  especially  in  his  attitude 
towards  Douglas,  he  had  the  means  of  measuring 
Seward.  In  spite  of  the  far  greater  experience  of  the 
latter  he  may  have  thought  himself  to  be  his  superior 
in  that  indefinable  thing — the  sheer  strength  of  a  man. 
Not  only  may  he  have  thought  this  ;  he  must  have 
known  it.  He  had  shown  his  grasp  of  the  essential 
facts  when  he  forced  the  Republican  party  to  do  battle 
with  Douglas  and  the  party  of  indifference  ;  he  showed 
the  same  nowr  when,  after  long  years  of  patience  and 
self-discipline,  he  pushed  himself  into  Seward's  place 
as  the  Republican  leader. 

All  the  same,  what  little  we  know  of  the  methods  by 
which  he  now  helped  his  own  promotion  suggests  that 
the  people  who  then  and  long  after  set  him  down  as  a 
second-rate  person  may  have  had  a  good  deal  to  go 
upon.  A  kind  friend  has  produced  a  letter  which  he 
wrote  in  March,  1860,  to  a  Kansas  gentleman  who 
desired  to  be  a  delegate  to  the  Republican  Convention, 
and  who  offered,  upon  condition,  to  persuade  his  fellow 
delegates  from  Kansas  to  support  Lincoln.  Here  is  the 
letter  :  "  As  to  your  kind  wishes  for  myself,  allow  me 
to  say  I  cannot  enter  the  ring  on  the  money  basis — 
first  because  in  the  main  it  is  wrong  ;  and  secondly  I 
have  not  and  cannot  get  the  money.  I  say  in  the  main 
the  use  of  money  is  wrong  ;  but  for  certain  objects  in 
a  political  contest  the  use  of  some  is  both  right  and 
indispensable.  With  me,  as  with  yourself,  this  long 
struggle  has  been  one  of  great  pecuniary  loss.  I  now 
distinctly  say  this  :  If  you  shall  be  appointed  a  delegate 
to  Chicago  I  will  furnish  one  hundred  dollars  to  bear 
the  expenses  of  the  trip."  The  Kansas  gentleman 


1 62  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

failed  to  obtain  the  support  of  the  Kansas  delegates  as 
a  body  for  Lincoln.  Lincoln  none  the  less  held  to  his 
promise  of  a  hundred  dollars  if  the  man  came  to  Chicago  ; 
and,  having,  we  are  assured,  much  confidence  in  him, 
took  the  earliest  opportunity  of  appointing  him  to  a 
lucrative  office,  besides  consulting  him  as  to  other 
appointments  in  Kansas.  This  is  all  that  we  know  of 
the  affair,  but  our  informant  presents  it  as  one  of  a 
number  of  instances  in  which  Lincoln  good-naturedly 
trusted  a  man  too  soon,  and  obstinately  clung  to  his 
mistake.  As  to  the  appointment,  the  man  had  evidently 
begun  by  soliciting  money  in  a  way  which  would  have 
marked  him  to  most  of  us  as  a  somewhat  unsuitable 
candidate  for  any  important  post  ;  and  the  payment  of 
the  hundred  dollars  plainly  transgresses  a  code  both  of 
honour  and  of  prudence  which  most  politicians  will 
recognise  and  which  should  not  need  definition.  To 
say,  as  Lincoln  probably  said  to  himself,  that  there  is 
nothing  intrinsically  wrong  in  a  moderate  payment  for 
expenses  to  a  fellow  worker  in  a  public  cause,  whom 
you  believe  to  have  sacrificed  much,  is  to  ignore  the 
point,  indeed  several  points.  Lincoln,  hungry  now  for 
some  success  in  his  own  unrewarded  career,  was  tempted 
to  a  small  manoeuvre  by  which  he  might  pick  up  a  little 
support ;  he  was  at  the  same  time  tempted,  no  less,  to  act 
generously  (according  to  his  means)  towards  a  man  who, 
he  readily  believed,  had  made  sacrifices  like  his  own.  He 
was  not  the  man  to  stand  against  this  double  temptation. 
Petty  lapses  of  this  order,  especially  when  the 
delinquent  may  be  seen  to  hesitate  and  excuse  himself, 
are  more  irritating  than  many  larger  and  more  brazen 
offences,  for  they  give  us  the  sense  of  not  knowing  where 
we  are.  When  they  are  committed  by  a  man  of 
seemingly  strong  and  high  character,  it  is  well  to  ask 
just  what  they  signify.  Some  of  the  shrewdest  observers 
of  Lincoln,  friendly  and  unfriendly,  concur  in  their 
description  of  the  weaknesses  of  which  this  incident  may 
serve  as  the  example,  weaknesses  partly  belonging  to 
his  temperament,  but  partly  such  as  a  man  risen  from 
poverty,  with  little  variety  of  experience  and  with  no 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  163 

background  of  home  training,  stands  small  chance  of 
escaping.  For  one  thing  his  judgment  of  men  and  how 
to  treat  them  was  as  bad  in  some  ways  as  it  was  good 
in  others.  His  own  sure  grasp  of  the  largest  and 
commonest  things  in  life,  and  his  sober  and  measured 
trust  in  human  nature  as  a  whole,  gave  him  a  rare 
knowledge  of  the  mind  of  the  people  in  the  mass. 
So,  too,  when  he  had  known  a  man  long,  or  been  with  him 
or  against  him  in  important  transactions,  he  sometimes 
developed  great  insight  and  sureness  of  touch ;  and, 
when  the  man  was  at  bottom  trustworthy,  his  robust 
confidence  in  him  was  sometimes  of  great  public  service. 
But  he  had  no  gift  of  rapid  perception  and  no  instinctive 
tact  or  prudence  in  regard  to  the  very  numerous  and 
very  various  men  with  whom  he  had  slight  dealings  on 
which  he  could  bestow  no  thought.  This  is  common 
with  men  who  have  risen  from  poverty  ;  if  they  have 
not  become  hard  and  suspicious,  they  are  generally 
obtuse  to  the  minor  indications  by  which  shrewd  men 
of  education  know  the  impostor,  and  they  are  perversely 
indulgent  to  little  meannesses  in  their  fellows  which 
they  are  incapable  of  committing  themselves.  In 
Lincoln  this  was  aggravated  by  an  immense  good 
nature — as  he  confessed,  he  could  hardly  say  "  no  "  ; 
— it  was  an  obstinate  good-nature,  which  found  a 
naughty  pleasure  in  refusing  to  be  corrected  ;  and  if 
it  should  happen  that  the  object  of  his  weak  benevo 
lence  had  given  him  personal  cause  of  offence,  the  good 
nature  became  more  incorrigible  than  ever.  Moreover, 
Lincoln's  strength,  was  a  slow  strength,  shown  most 
in  matters  in  which  elementary  principles  of  right  or 
the  concentration  of  intense  thought  guided  him. 
Where  minor  and  more  subtle  principles  of  conduct 
should  have  come  in,  on  questions  which  had  not  come 
within  the  range  of  his  reflection  so  far  and  to  which, 
amidst  his  heavy  duties,  he  could  not  spare  much 
cogitation,  he  would  not  always  show  acute  perception, 
and,  which  is  far  worse,  he  would  often  show  weak 
ness  of  will.  The  present  instance  may  be  ever  so 
trifling,  yet  it  does  relate  to  the  indistinct  and  dangerous 


1 64  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

borderland  of  political  corruption.  It  need  arouse  no 
very  serious  suspicions.  Mr.  Herndon,  whose  per 
tinacious  researches  unearthed  that  Kansas  gentleman's 
correspondence,  and  who  is  keenly  censorious  of 
Lincoln's  fault,  in  the  upshot  trusts  and  reveres  Lincoln. 
And  the  massive  testimony  of  his  keenest  critics  to  his 
honesty  quite  decides  the  matter.  But  Lincoln  had 
lived  in  a  simple  Western  town,  not  in  one  of  the  already 
polluted  great  cities  ;  he  was  a  poor  man  himself  and 
took  the  fact  that  wealth  was  used  against  him  as  a 
part  of  the  inevitable  drawbacks  of  his  lot  ;  and  it  is 
certain  that  he  did  not  clearly  take  account  of  the 
whole  business  of  corruption  and  jobbery  as  a  hideous 
and  growing  peril  to  America.  It  is  certain  too  that 
he  lacked  the  delicate  perception  of  propriety  in  such 
matters,  or  the  strict  resolution  in  adhering  to  it  on 
small  occasions,  which  might  have  been  possessed  by  a 
far  less  honest  man.  The  severest  criticisms  which 
Lincoln  afterwards  incurred  were  directed  to  the 
appointments  which  he  made  ;  we  shall  see  hereafter 
that  he  had  very  solid  reasons  for  his  general  conduct 
in  such  matters  ;  but  it  cannot  be  said  with  conviction 
that  he  had  that  horror  of  appointment  on  other  grounds 
than  merit  which  enlightens,  though  it  does  not  always 
govern,  more  educated  statesmen.  His  administration 
would  have  been  more  successful,  and  the  legacy  he  left 
to  American  public  life  more  bountiful,  if  his  traditions, 
or  the  length  of  his  day's  work,  had  allowed  him  to  be 
more  careful  in  these  things.  As  it  is  he  was  not  com 
mended  to  the  people  of  America  and  must  not  be 
commended  to  us  by  the  absence  of  defects  as  a  ruler 
or  as  a  man,  but  by  the  qualities  to  which  his  defects 
belonged.  An  acute  literary  man  wrote  of  Lincoln, 
when  he  had  been  three  years  in  office,  these  remark 
able  words  :  "  You  can't  help  feeljng  an  interest  in  him, 
a  sympathy  and  a  kind  of  pity  ;  feeling,  too,  that  he 
has  some  qualities  of  great  value,  yet  fearing  that  his 
weak  points  may  wreck  him  or  may  wreck  something. 
His  life  seems  a  series  of  wise,  sound  conclusions,  slowly 
reached,  oddly  worked  out,  on  great  questions,  with 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  165 

constant  failures  in  administration  of  detail  and  deal 
ings  with  individuals."  It  was  evidently  a  clever  man 
who  wrote  this ;  he  would  have  been  a  wise  man  if  he 
had  known  that  the  praise  he  was  bestowing  on  Lincoln 
was  immeasurably  greater  than  the  blame. 

So  the  natural  prejudice  of  those  who  welcomed 
Lincoln  as  a  prophet  in  the  Cooper  Institute  but  found 
his  candidature  for  the  Presidency  ridiculous,  was  not 
wholly  without  justification.  His  partisans,  however — 
also  not  unjustly — used  his  humble  origin  for  all  it  was; 
worth.  The  Republicans  of  Illinois  were  assembled  at 
Decatur  in  preparation  for  the  Chicago  Convention, 
when,  amid  tumultuous  cheers,  there  marched  in  old 
John  Hanks  and  another  pioneer  bearing  on  their 
shoulders  two  long  fence  rails  labelled  :  "  Two  rails 
from  a  lot  made  by  Abraham  Lincoln  and  John  Hanks 
in  the  Sangamon  Bottom  in  the  year  1830."  "  Gentle 
men,"  said  Lincoln,  in  response  to  loud  calls,  "  I 
suppose  you  want  to  know  something  about  those 
things.  Well,  the  truth  is,  John  Hanks  and  I  did 
make  rails  in  the  Sangamon  Bottom.  I  don't  know 
whether  we  made  those  rails  or  not  ;  fact  is,  I  don't 
think  they  are  a  credit  to  the  makers.  But  I  do  know 
this  :  I  made  rails  then,  and  I  think  I  could  make  better 
ones  than  these  now."  It  is  unnecessary  to  tell  of  the  part 
those  rails  were  to  play  in  the  coming  campaign.  It  is  a 
contemptible  trait  in  books  like  that  able  novel  "  Demo 
cracy,"  that  they  treat  the  sentiment  which  attached 
to  the  "  Rail-splitter  "  as  anything  but  honourable. 

The  Republican  Convention  met  at  Chicago  in  cir 
cumstances  of  far  less  dignity  than  the  Democratic 
Convention  at  Charleston.  Processions  and  brass  bands, 
rough  fellows  collected  by  Lincoln's  managers,  rowdies 
imported  from  New  York  by  Seward's,  filled  the  streets 
with  noise  ;  and  the  saloon  keepers  did  good  business. 
Yet  the  actual  Convention  consisted  of  grave  men  in 
an  earnest  mood.  Besides  Seward  and  Chase  and 
Lincoln,  Messrs.  Cameron  of  Pennsylvania  and  Bates  of 
Ohio,  of  whom  we  shall  hear  later,  were  proposed  for 
the  Presidency.  So  also  were  Messrs.  Dayton  and 


166  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Collamer,  politicians  of  some  repute  ;  and  McLean,  late 
of  the  Supreme  Court,  had  some  supporters.  The 
prevalent  expectation  in  the  States  was  that  Seward 
would  easily  secure  the  nomination,  but  it  very  soon 
appeared  in  the  Convention  that  his  opponents  were  too 
strong  for  that.  Several  ballots  took  place  ;  there 
were  the  usual  conferences  and  bargainings,  which 
probably  affected  the  result  but  little  ;  Lincoln's 
managers,  especially  Judge  David  Davis,  afterwards  of 
the  Supreme  Court,  were  shrewd  people  ;  Lincoln  had 
written  to  them  expressly  that  they  could  make  no 
bargain  binding  on  him,  but  when  Cameron  was  clearly 
out  of  the  running  they  did  promise  Cameron's  sup 
porters  a  place  in  Lincoln's  Cabinet,  and  a  similar 
promise  was  made  for  one  Caleb  Smith.  The  delegates 
from  Pennsylvania  went  on  to  Lincoln  ;  then  those  of 
Ohio  ;  and  before  long  his  victory  was  assured.  A 
Committee  of  the  Convention,  some  of  them  sick  at 
heart,  was  sent  to  bear  the  invitation  to  Lincoln.  He 
received  them  in  his  little  house  with  a  simple  dignity 
which  one  of  them  has  recorded  ;  and  as  they  came 
away  one  said,  "  Well,  we  might  have  chosen  a  hand 
somer  article,  but  I  doubt  whether  a  better." 

On  the  whole,  if  we  can  put  aside  the  illusion  which 
besets  us,  who  read  the  preceding  history  if  at  all 
in  the  light  of  Lincoln's  speeches,  and  to  whom  his 
competitors  are  mere  names,  this  was  the  most  surpris-: 
ing  nomination  ever  made  in  America.  Other  Presi 
dential  candidates  have  been  born  in  poverty,  but  none 
ever  wore  the  scars  of  poverty  so  plainly ;  others  have 
been  intrinsically  more  obscure,  but  these  have  usually 
been  chosen  as  bearing  the  hall-mark  of  eminent  pros 
perity  or  gentility.  Lincoln  had  indeed  at  this  time 
displayed  brilliant  ability  in  the  debates  with  Douglas, 
and  he  had  really  shown  a  statesman's  grasp  of  the 
situation  more  than  any  other  Republican  leader.  The 
friends  in  Illinois  who  put  him  forward  —  men  like 
David  Davis,  who  was  a  man  of  distinction  himself 
— did  so  from  a  true  appreciation  of  his  powers. 
But  this  does  not  seem  to  have  been  the  case  with 


THE  RISE  OF  LINCOLN  167 

the  bulk  of  the  delegates  from  other  States.  The 
explanation  given  us  of  their  action  is  curious.  The 
choice  was  not  the  result  of  merit  ;  on  the  other  hand, 
it  was  not  the  work  of  the  ordinary  wicked  wire-puller, 
for  what  may  be  called  the  machine  was  working  for 
Seward.  The  choice  was  made  by  plain  representative 
Americans  who  set  to  themselves  this  question  :  "  With 
what  candidate  can  we  beat  Douglas  ?  "  and  who  found 
the  answer  in  the  prevalence  of  a  popular  impression, 
concerning  Lincoln  and  Seward,  which  was  in  fact 
wholly  mistaken.  There  was,  it  happens,  earnest 
opposition  to  Seward  among  some  Eastern  Republicans 
on  the  good  ground  that  he  was  a  clean  man  but  with 
doubtful  associates.  This  opposition  could  not  by  itself 
have  defeated  him.  What  did  defeat  him  was  his 
reputation  at  the  moment  as  a  very  advanced  Republican 
who  would  scare  away  the  support  of  the  weaker 
brethren.  He  was,  for  instance,  the  author  of  the 
alarming  phrase  about  "  irrepressible  conflict,"  and  he 
had  spoken  once,  in  a  phrase  that  was  misinterpreted, 
about  "  a  higher  law  than  the  Constitution."  Lincoln 
had  in  action  taken  a  far  stronger  line  than  Seward  ; 
he  was  also  the  author  of  the  phrase  about  the  house 
divided  against  itself  ;  but  then,  besides  the  fact  that 
Lincoln  was  well  regarded  just  where  Douglas  was  most 
popular,  Lincoln  was  a  less  noted  man  than  Seward 
and  his  stronger  words  occasioned  less  wide  alarm. 
So,  to  please  those  who  liked  compromise,  the  Convention 
rejected  a  man  who  would  certainly  have  compromised,  , 
and  chose  one  who  would  give  all  that  moderation  j 
demanded  and  die  before  he  yielded  one  further  inch.  | 
Many  Americans  have  been  disposed  to  trace  in  the  / 
raising  up  of  Lincoln  the  hand  of  a  Providence  protecting  I 
their  country  in  its  worst  need.  It  would  be  affectation  [ 
to  set  their  idea  altogether  aside  ;  it  is,  at  any  rate,  a 
memorable  incident  in  the  history  of  a  democracy, 
permeated  with  excellent  intentions  but  often  hopelessly 
subject  to  inferior  influences,  that  at  this  critical  moment 
the  fit  man  was  chosen  on  the  very  ground  of  his 
supposed  unfitness. 


168  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

The  result  of  the  contest  between  the  four  Presidential 
candidates  was  rendered  almost  a  foregone  conclusion 
by  the  decision  of  the  Democrats.  Lincoln  in  deference 
to  the  usual  and  seemly  procedure  took  no  part  in  the 
campaign,  nor  do  his  doings  in  the  next  months  concern 
us.  Seward,  to  his  great  honour,  after  privately 
expressing  his  bitter  chagrin  at  the  bestowal  of  what 
was  his  due  upon  "  a  little  Illinois  attorney,"  threw 
himself  whole-heartedly  into  the  contest,  and  went 
about  making  admirable  speeches.  On  the  night  of 
November  6,  Lincoln  sat  alone  with  the  operator  in  the 
telegraph  box  at  Springfield,  receiving  as  they  came  in 
the  results  of  the  elections  of  Presidential  electors  in  the 
various  States.  Long  before  the  returns  were  complete 
his  knowledge  of  such  matters  made  him  sure  of  his 
return,  and  before  he  left  that  box  he  had  solved  in 
principle,  as  he  afterwards  declared,  the  first  and  by  no 
means  least  important  problem  of  his  Presidency,  the 
choice  of  a  Cabinet. 

The  victory  was  in  one  aspect  far  from  complete. 
If  we  look  not  at  the  votes  in  the  Electoral  College  with 
which  the  formal  choice  of  President  lay,  but  at  the 
popular  votes  by  which  the  electors  were  returned,  we 
shall  see  that  the  new  President  was  elected  by  a 
minority  of  the  American  people.  He  had  a  large 
majority  over  Douglas,  but  if  Douglas  had  received  the 
votes  which  were  given  for  the  Southern  Democrat, 
Breckinridge,  he  would  have  had  a  considerable  majority 
over  Lincoln,  though  the  odd  machinery  of  the  Electoral 
College  would  still  have  kept  him  out  of  the  Presidency. 
In  another  aspect  it  was  a  fatally  significant  victory. 
Lincoln's  votes  were  drawn  only  from  the  Northern 
States  ;  he  carried  almost  all  the  free  States  and  he 
carried  no  others.  For  the  first  time  in  American 
history,  the  united  North  had  used  its  superior  numbers 
to  outvote  the  South.  This  would  in  any  case  have 
caused  great  vexation,  and  the  personality  of  the  man 
chosen  by  the  North  aggravated  it.  The  election  of 
Lincoln  was  greeted  throughout  the  South  with  a 
howl  of  derision. 


CHAPTER  VI 

SECESSION 

I.  The  Case  of  the  South  against  the  Union. 

THE  Republicans  of  the  North  had  given  their  votes 
upon  a  very  clear  issue,  but  probably  few  of  them  had 
fully  realised  how  grave  a  result  would  follow.  Within! 
a  few  days  of  the  election  of  Lincoln  the  first  step  in  the\ 
movement  of  Secession  had  been  taken,  and  before  the! 
new  President  entered  upon  his  duties  it  was  plain  that 
either  the  dissatisfied  States  must  be  allowed  to  leave 
the  Union  or  the  Union  must  be  maintained  by  war. 

Englishmen  at  that  time  and  since  have  found  a 
difficulty  in  grasping  the  precise  cause  of  the  war  that 
followed.  Of  those  who  were  inclined  to  sympathise 
with  the  North,  some  regarded  the  war  as  being  simply 
about  slavery,  and,  while  unhesitatingly  opposed  to 
slavery,  wondered  whether  it  was  right  to  make  war 
upon  it ;  others,  regarding  it  as  a  war  for  the  Union 
and  not  against  slavery  at  all,  wondered  whether  it 
was  right  to  make  war  for  a  Union  that  could  not  be 
peaceably  maintained.  Now  it  is  seldom  possible  to 
state  the  cause  of  a  war  quite  candidly  in  a  single 
sentence,  because  as  a  rule  there  are  on  each  side  people 
who  concur  in  the  final  rupture  for  somewhat  different 
reasons.  But,  in  this  case,  forecasting  a  -  conclusion 
which  must  be  examined  in  some  detail,  we  can  state 
the  cause  of  war  in  a  very  few  sentences.  If  we  ask 
first  what  the  South  fought  for,  the  answer  is  :  the 
leaders  of  the  South  and  the  great  mass  of  the  Southern 
people  had  a  single  supreme  and  all-embracing  object  in 
view,  namely,  to  ensure  the  permanence  and,  if  need  be, 
the  extension  of  the  slave  system  ;  they  carried  with 
them,  however,  a  certain  number  of  Southerners  who 


170  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

were  opposed  or  at  least  averse  to  slavery,  but  who 
thought  that  the  right  of  their  States  to  leave  the  Union 
or  remain  in  it  as  they  chose  must  be  maintained.  If  we 
ask  what  the  North  fought  for,  the  answer  is  :  A 
majority,  by  no  means  overwhelming,  of  the  Northern 
people  refused  to  purchase  the  adhesion  of  the  South 
by  conniving  at  any  further  extension  of  slavery,  and 
an  overwhelming  majority  refused  to  let  the  South 

.  dissolve  the  Union  for  slavery  or  for  any  other  cause. 

I     The   issue   about   slavery,   then,    became   merged   in 

\  another  issue,  concerning  the  Union,  which  had  so  far 

|  remained  in  the  background. 

'  The  first  thing  that  must  be  grasped  about  it  is  the 
total  difference  of  view  which  now  existed  between  North 
and  South  in  regard  to  the  very  nature  of  their  connec 
tion.  The  divergence  had  taken  place  so  completely  and 
in  the  main  so  quietly  that  each"  side  now  realised  with 
surprise  and  indignation  that  the  other  held  an  opposite 
opinion.  In  the  North  the  Union  was  regarded  as 
constituting  a  permanent  and  unquestionable  national 
unity  from  which  it  was  flat  rebellion  for  a  State  or  any 
other  combination  of  persons  to  secede.  In  the  South 
the  Union  appeared  merely  as  a  peculiarly  venerable 
treaty  of  alliance,  of  which  the  dissolution  would  be 
very  painful,  but  which  left  each  State  a  sovereign 
body  with  an  indefeasible  right  to  secede  if  in  the  last 
resort  it  judged  that  the  painful  necessity  had  come. 
In  a  few  border  States  there  was  division  and  doubt  on 
this  subject,  a  fact  which  must  have  helped  to  hide  from 
each  side  the  true  strength  of  opinion  on  the  other. 
But,  setting  aside  these  border  States,  there  were  in 
the  North  some  who  doubted  whether  it  was  expedient 
to  fight  for  the  Union,  but  none  of  any  consequence  who 
doubted  that  it  was  constitutionally  correct  ;  and 
there  were  in  the  South  men  who  insisted  that  no 
occasion  to  secede  had  arisen,  but  these  very  men,  when 
outvoted  in  their  States,  maintained  most  passionately 
the  absolute  right  of  secession. 

The  two  sides  contended  for  two  contrary  doctrines 
of  constitutional  law.     It  is  natural  when  parties  are 


SECESSION  171 

disputing  over  a  question  of  political  wisdom  and  of 
moral  right,  that  each  should  claim  for  its  contention  if 
possible  the  sanction  of  acknowledged  legal  principle. 
So  it  was  with  the  parties  to  the  English  Civil  War,  and 
the  tendency  to  regard  matters  from  a  legal  point  of 
view  is  to  this  day  deeply  engrained  in  the  mental 
habits  of  America.  But  North  and  South  were  really 
divided  by  something  other  than  legal  opinion,  a 
difference  in  the  objects  to  which  their  feelings  of 
loyalty  and  patriotism  were  directed.  This  difference 
found  apt  expression  in  the  Cabinet  of  President 
Buchanan,  who  of  course  remained  in  office  between 
the  election  of  Lincoln  in  November  and  his  inauguration 
in  March.  General  Cass  of  Michigan  had  formerly  stood 
for  the  Presidency  with  the  support  of  the  South,  and 
he  held  Cabinet  office  now  as  a  sympathiser  with  the 
South  upon  slavery,  but  he  was  a  Northerner.  "  I  see 
how  it  is,"  he  said  to  two  of  his  colleagues  ;  "  you  are  a 
Virginian,  and  you  are  a  South  Carolinan  ;  I  am  not  a 
Michigander,  I  am  an  American." 

In  a  former  ^chapter  the  creation  of  the  Union  and 
the  beginnings  of  a  common  national  life  have  been 
traced  in  outline.  Obstacles  to  the  Union  had  existed 
both  in  the  North  and  in  the  South,  and,  after  it  had 
been  carried,  the  tendency  to  threaten  disruption  upon 
some  slight  conflict  of  interest  had  shown  itself  in 
each.  But  a  proud  sense  of  single  nationality  had  soon 
become  prevalent  in  both,  and  in  the  North  nothing 
whatever  had  happened  to  set  back  this  growth,  for  the 
idea  which  Lowell  had  once  attributed  to  his  Hosea  Biglow 
of  abjuring  Union  with  slave-owners  was  a  negligible  force. 
Undivided  allegiance  to  the  Union  was  the  natural 
sentiment  of  citizens  of  Ohio  or  Wisconsin,  States 
created  by  the  authority  of  the  Union  out  of  the  common 
dominion  of  the  Union.  It  had  become,  if  anything, 
more  deeply  engrained  in  the  original  States  of  the 
North,  for  their  predominant  occupation  in  commerce 
would  tend  in  this  particular  to  give  them  larger  views. 
The  pride  of  a  Boston  man  in  the  Commonwealth  of 
Massachusetts  was  of  the  same  order  as  his  pride  in 


172  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  city  of  Boston  ;  both  were  largely  pride  in  the  part 
which  Boston  and  Massachusetts  had  taken  in  making 
the  United  States  of  America.  Such  a  man  knew  well 
that  South  Carolina  had  once  threatened  secession,  but, 
for  that  matter,  the  so-called  Federalists  of  New 
England  had  once  threatened  it.  The  argument  of 
Webster  in  the  case  of  South  Carolina  was  a  classic, 
and  was  taken  as  conclusive  on  the  question  of  legal 
right.  The  terser  and  more  resonant  declaration  of 
President  Jackson,  a  Southerner,  and  the  response  to  it 
which  thrilled  all  States,  South  or  North,  outside  South 
Carolina,  had  set  the  seal  to  Webster's  doctrines. 
There  had  been  loud  and  ominous  talk  of  secession 
lately  ;  it  was  certainly  not  mere  bluster  ;  Northerners  in 
the  main  were  cautious  politicians  and  had  been  tempted 
to  go  far  to  conciliate  it.  But  if  the  claim  of  Southern 
States  were  put  in  practice,  the  whole  North  would  now 
regard  it  not  as  a  respectable  claim,  but  as  an  outrage. 
It  is  important  to  notice  that  the  disposition  to  take 
this  view  did  not  depend  upon  advanced  opinions 
against  slavery.  Some  of  the  most  violent  opponents 
of  slavery  would  care  relatively  little  about  the  Con 
stitution  or  the  Union  ;  they  would  at  first  hesitate  as 
to  whether  a  peaceful  separation  between  States  which 
felt  so  differently  on  a  moral  question  like  slavery  was 
not  a  more  Christian  solution  of  their  difference  than  a 
fratricidal  war.  On  the  other  hand,  men  who  cared 
little  about  slavery  and  would  gladly  have  sacrificed  any 
convictions  they  had  upon  that  matter  for  the  sake  of 
the  Union,  were  at  first  none  the  less  vehement  in  their 
anger  at  an  attack  upon  the  Union.  There  is,  moreover, 
a  more  subtle  but  still  important  point  to  be  observed  in 
this  connection.  Democrats  in  the  North  inclined  as  a 
party  to  stringent  and  perhaps  pedantically  legal 
views  of  State  rights  as  against  the  rights  of  the  Union  ; 
but  this  by  no  means  necessarily  meant  that  they 
sympathised  more  than  Republicans  with  the  claim 
to  dissolve  the  Union.  They  laid  emphasis  on 
State  rights  merely  because  they  believed  that  these 
would  be  a  bulwark  against  any  sort  of  government 


SECESSION  173 

tyranny,  and  that  the  large  power  which  was  reserved 
to  the  local  or  provincial  authorities  of  the  States  made 
the  government  of  the  nation  as  a  whole  more  truly 
expressive  of  the  will  of  the  whole  people.  They  now 
found  themselves  entangled  (as  we  shall  see)  in  curious 
doubts  as  to  what  the  Federal  Government  might  do  to 
maintain  the  Union,  but  they  had  not  the  faintest  doubt 
that  the  Union  was  meant  to  be  maintained.^ /The  point 
which  is  now  being  emphasised  must  not  be  misappre 
hended  ;  differences  of  sentiment  in  regard  to  slavery,  in 
regard  to  State  rights,  in  regard  to  the  authority  of 
Government,  did,  as  the  war  went  on  and  the  price  was: 
paid,  gravely  embarrass  the  North  ;  but  it  was  a  solid 
and  unhesitating  North  which  said  that  the  South  had 
no  right  to  secede 

Up  to  a  certain  point  the  sense  of  patriotic  pride  in 
the  Union  had  grown  also  in  the  South.  It  was 
fostered  at  first  by  the  predominant  part  which  the 
South  played  in  the  political  life  of  the  country.  But  for 
a  generation  past  the  sense  of  a  separate  interest  of 
the  South  had  been  growing  still  more  vigorously, 
The  political  predominance  of  the  South  had  continued, 
but  under  a  standing  menace  of  downfall  as  the  North 

trew  more  populous  and  the  patriotism  which  it  at 
rst  encouraged  had  become  perverted  into  an  arrogantly 
unconscious  feeling  that  the  Union  was  an  excellent 
thing  on  condition  that  it  was  subservient  to  the 
South.  The  common  interest  of  the  Southern  States 
was  slavery ;  and,  when  the  Northerners  had  become  a 
majority  which  might  one  day  dominate  the  Federal 
Government,  this  common  interest  of  the  slave  States 
found  a  weapon  at  hand  in  the  doctrine  of  the  inherent 
sovereignty  of  each  individual  State.  This  doctrine  of 
State  sovereignty  had  come  to  be  held  as  universally 
in  the  South  as  the  strict  Unionist  doctrine  in  the 
North,  and  held  with  as  quiet  and  unshakable  a 
confidence  that  it  could  not  be  questioned.  It  does  not 
seem  at  all  strange  that  the  State,  as  against  the  Union, 
should  have  remained  the  supreme  object  of  loyalty  in 
old  communities  like  those  of  South  Carolina  and  Virginia, 


174  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

abounding  as  they  did  in  conservative  influences  which 
were  lacking  in  the  North.  But  this  provincial  loyalty 
was  not  in  the  same  sense  a  natural  growth  in  States  like 
Alabama  or  Mississippi.  These,  no  less  than  Indiana 
and  Illinois,  were  the  creatures  of  the  Federal  Congress, 
set  up  within  the  memory  of  living  men,  with  arbitrary 
boundaries  that  cut  across  any  old  lines  of  division. 
There  was,  in  fact,  no  spontaneous  feeling  of  allegiance 
attaching  to  these  political  units,  and  the  doctrine  of 
their  sovereignty  had  no  use  except  as  a  screen  for  the 
interest  in  slavery  which  the  Southern  States  had  in 
common.  But  Calhoun,  in  a  manner  characteristic  of 
his  peculiar  and  dangerous  type  of  intellect,  had  early 
seen  in  a  view  of  State  sovereignty,  which  would  other 
wise  have  been  obsolete,  the  most  serviceable  weapon 
for  the  joint  interests  of  the  Southern  States.  In  a 
society  where  intellectual  life  was  restricted,  his 
ascendency  had  been  great,  though  his  disciples  had, 
reasonably  enough,  thrown  aside  the  qualifications  which 
his  subtle  mind  had  attached  to  the  right  of  secession. 
Thus  in  the  Southern  States  generally,  even  among 
men  most  strongly  opposed  to  the  actual  proposal  to 
secede,  the  real  or  alleged  constitutional  right  of  a 
State  to  secede  if  it  chose  now  passed  unquestioned  and 
was  even  regarded  as  a  precious  liberty. 

It  is  impossible  to  avoid  asking  whether  on  this 
question  of  constitutional  law  the  Northern  opinion 
or  the  Southern  opinion  was  correct.  (The  question  was 
indeed  an  important  question  in  determining  the  proper 
course  of  procedure  for  a  President  when  confronted 
with  secession,  but  it  must  be  protested  that  the  moral 
right  and  political  wisdom  of  neither  party  in  the  war 
depended  mainly,  if  at  all,  upon  this  legal  point.  It  was 
a  question  of  the  construction  which  a  court  of  law 
should  put  upon  a  document  which  was  not  drawn  up 
with  any  view  to  determining  this  point.)  If  we  go 
behind  the  Constitution,  which  was  then  and  is  now  in 
force,  to  the  original  document  of  which  it  took  the 
place,  we  shall  find  it  entitled  "  Articles  of  Confederation 
and  Perpetual  Union,"  but  we  shall  not  find  any  such 


SECESSION  175 

provisions  as  men  desirous  of  creating  a  stable  and 
permanent  federal  government  might  have  been  ex 
pected  to  frame.  If  we  read  the  actual  Constitution  we 
shall  find  no  word  distinctly  implying  that  a  State  could 
or  could  not  secede.  As  to  the  real  intention  of  its 
chief  authors,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  they  hoped  and 
trusted  the  Union  would  prove  indissoluble,  and 
equally  little  doubt  that  they  did  not  wish  to  obtrude 
upon  those  whom  they  asked  to  enter  into  it  the  thought 
that  this  step  would  be  irrevocable.  For  the  view  taken 
in  the  South  there  is  one  really  powerful  argument,  on 
which  Jefferson  Davis  insisted  passionately  in  the 
argumentative  memoirs  with  which  he  solaced  himself 
in  old  age.  It  is  that  in  several  of  the  States,  when  the 
Constitution  was  accepted,  public  declarations  were 
made  to  the  citizens  of  those  States  by  their  own 
representatives  that  a  State  might  withdraw  from  the 
Union.  But  this  is  far  from  conclusive.  No  man  gets 
rid  of  the  obligation  of  a  bond  by  telling  a  witness  that 
he  does  not  mean  to  be  bound  ;  the  question  is  not 
what  he  means,  but  what  the  party  with  whom  he  deals 
must  naturally  take  him  to  mean.  Now  the  Con 
stitution  of  the  United  States  upon  the  face  of  it  pur 
ports  to  create  a  government  able  to  take  its  place 
among  the  other  governments  of  the  world,  able  if  it 
declares  war  to  wield  the  whole  force  of  its  country  in 
that  war,  and  able  if  it  makes  peace  to  impose  that 
peace  upon  all  its  subjects.  This  seems  to  imply  that 
the  authority  of  that  government  over  part  of  the 
country  should  be  legally  indefeasible.  It  would  have 
been  ridiculous  if,  during  a  war  with  Great  Britain, 
States  on  the  Canadian  border  should  have  had  the 
legal  right  to  secede,  and  set  up  a  neutral  government 
with  a  view  to  subsequent  reunion  with  Great  Britain. 
The  sound  legal  view  of  this  matter  would  seem  to  be : 
that  the  doctrine  of  secession  is  so  repugnant  to  the 
primary  intention  with  which  the  national  instrument 
of  government  was  framed  that  it  could  only  have  been 
supported  by  an  express  reservation  of  the  right  to 
secede  in  the  Constitution  itself. 


1 76  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

The  Duke  of  Argyll,  one  of  the  few  British  statesmen 
of  the  time  who  followed  this  struggle  with  intelligent 
interest,  briefly  summed  up  the  question  thus  :  "  I  know 
of  no  government  in  the  world  that  could  possibly  have 
admitted  the  right  of  secession  from  its  own  allegiance." 
Oddly  enough,  President  Buchanan,  in  his  Message  to 
Congress  on  December  4,  put  the  same  point  not  less 
forcibly. 

But  to  say — as  in  a  legal  sense  we  may — that  the 
Southern  States  rebelled  is  not  necessarily  to  say  that 
they  were  wrong.  The  deliberate  endeavour  of  a 
people  to  separate  themselves  from  the  political 
sovereignty  under  which  they  live  and  set  up  a  new 
political  community,  in  which  their  national  life  shall 
develop  itself  more  fully  or  more  securely,  must  always 
command  a  certain  respect.  Whether  it  is  entitled 
further  to  the  full  sympathy  and  to  the  support  or  at 
least  acquiescence  of  others  is  a  question  which  in 
particular  cases  involves  considerations  such  as  cannot 
be  foreseen  in  any  abstract  discussion  of  political 
theory.  But,  speaking  very  generally,  it  is  a  question  in 
the  main  of  the  worth  which  we  attribute  on  the  one 
hand  to  the  common  life  to  which  it  is  sought  to  give 
freer  scope,  and  on  the  other  hand  to  the  common  life 
which  may  thereby  be  weakened  or  broken  up.  It 
sometimes  seems  to  be  held  that  when  a  decided 
majority  of  the  people  whose  voices  can  be  heard,  in  a 
more  or  less  defined  area,  elect  to  live  for  the  future 
under  a  particular  government,  all  enlightened  men 
elsewhere  would  wish  them  to  have  their  way.  If  any 
such  principle  could  be  accepted  without  qualification, 
few  movements  for  independence  would  ever  have  been 
more  completely  justified  than  the  secession  of  the 
Southern  States.  If  we  set  aside  the  highland  region  of 
which  mention  has  already  been  made,  in  the  six 
cotton-growing  States  which  first  seceded,  and  in  several 
of  those  which  followed  as  soon  as  it  was  clear  that 
secession  would  be  resisted,  the  preponderance  of  opinion 
in  favour  of  the  movement  was  overwhelming.  This 
was  not  only  so  among  the  educated  and  governing 


SECESSION  177 

portions  of  society,  which  were  interested  in  slavery. 
While  the  negroes  themselves  were  unorganised  and 
dumb  and  made  no  stir  for  freedom,  the  poorer  class  of 
white  people,  to  whom  the  institution  of  slavery  was  in 
reality  oppressive,  were  quite  unconscious  of  this  ;  the 
enslavement  of  the  negro  appeared  to  them  a  tribute  to 
their  own  dignity,  and  their  indiscriminating  spirit  of 
independence  responded  enthusiastically  to  the  appeal 
that  they  should  assert  themselves  against  the  real  or 
fancied  pretensions  of  the  North.  So  large  a  statement 
would  require  some  qualification  if  we  were  here  con 
cerned  with  the  life  of  a  Southern  leader  ;  and  there 
was  of  course  a  brief  space,  to  be  dealt  with  in  this 
chapter,  in  which  the  question  of  secession  hung  in  the 
balance,  and  it  is  true  in  this,  as  in  every  case,  that  the 
men  who  gave  the  initial  push  were  few.  But,  broadly 
speaking,  it  is  certain  that  the  movement  for  secession 
was  begun  with  at  least  as  general  an  enthusiasm  and 
maintained  with  at  least  as  loyal  a  devotion  as  any 
national  movement  with  which  it  can  be  compared. 
And  yet  to-day,  just  fifty-one  years  after  the  consumma 
tion  of  its  failure,  it  may  be  doubted  whether  one  soul 
among  the  people  concerned  regrets  that  it  failed. 

English  people  from  that  time  to  this  have  found  the 
statement  incredible  ;  but  the  fact  is  that  this  imposing! 
movement,  in  which  rich  and  poor,  gentle  and  simple, 
astute  men  of  state  and  pious  clergymen,  went  hand  in 
hand  to  the  verge  of  ruin  and  beyond,  was  undertaken  1 
simply  -arndr-^salelyin^  behalf  of  slavery.  Northern  I 
writers  of  the  time  founcl  it  so  surprismg^that  they  took 
refuge  in  the  theory  of  conspiracy,  alleging  that  a  handful 
of  schemers  succeeded,  by  the  help  of  fictitious  popular 
clamour  and  intimidation  of  their  opponents,  in  launching 
the  South  upon  a  course  to  which  the  real  mind  of  the 
people  was  averse.  Later  and  calmer  historical  survey 
of  the  facts  has  completely  dispelled  this  view  ;  and 
the  English  suspicion,  that  there  must  have  been  some 
cause  beyond  and  above  slavery  for  desiring  inde 
pendence,  never  had  any  facts  to  support  it.  Since 
1830  no  exponent  of  Southern  views  had  ever  hinted  at 


1 78  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

secession  on  any  other  ground  than  slavery ;  every 
Southern  leader  declared  with  undoubted  truth  that 
on  every  other  ground  he  prized  the  Union  ;  outside 
South  Carolina  every  Southern  leader  made  an  earnest 
attempt  before  he  surrendered  the  Union  cause  to  secure 
the  guarantees  he  thought  sufficient  for  slavery  within 
the  Union.  The  Southern  statesman  (for  the  soldiers 
were  not  statesmen)  whose  character  most  attracts 
sympathy  now  was  Alexander  Stephens,  the  Vice- 
President  of  the  Southern  Confederacy,  and  though 
he  was  the  man  who  persisted  longest  in  the  view  that 
slavery  could  be  adequately  secured  without  secession, 
he  was  none  the  less  entitled  to  speak  for  the  South 
in  his  remarkable  words  on  the  Constitution  adopted  by 
the  Southern  Confederacy  :  "  The  new  Constitution  has 
put  at  rest  for  ever  all  the  agitating  questions  relating 
to  our  peculiar  institution,  African  slavery.  This  was 
the  immediate  cause  of  the  late  rupture  and  present 
revolution.  The  prevailing  ideas  entertained  by  Jeffer 
son  and  most  of  the  leading  statesmen  at  the  time  of 
the  old  Constitution  were  that  the  enslavement  of  the 
African  was  wrong  in  principle  socially,  morally,  and 
politically.  Our  new  government  is  founded  upon 
exactly  the  opposite  idea  ;  its  foundations  are  laid, 
its  corner  stone  rests,  upon  the  great  truth  that  the 
negro  is  not  the  equal  of  the  white  man  ;  that  slavery — 
subordination  to  the  white  man — is  his  natural  and 
normal  condition.  This,  our  new  government,  is  the  first 
in  the  history  of  the  world  based  upon  this  great 
physical,  philosophical,  and  moral  truth.  The  great 
objects  of  humanity  are  best  attained  when  there  is 
conformity  to  the  Creator's  laws  and  decrees."  Equally 
explicit  and  void  of  shame  was  the  Convention  of  the 
State  of  Mississippi.  "  Our  position,"  they  declared, 
"  is  thoroughly  identified  with  slavery." 

It  is  common  to  reproach  the  Southern  leaders  with 
reckless  folly.  They  tried  to  destroy  the  Union,  which 
they  really  valued,  for  the  sake  of  slavery,  which  they 
valued  more  ;  they  in  fact  destroyed  slavery  ;  and  they 
did  this,  it  is  said,  in  alarm  at  an  imaginary  danger. 


SECESSION  179 

This  is  not  a  true  ground  of  reproach,  to  them.  It  is 
true  that  the  danger  to  slavery  from  the  election  of 
Lincoln  was  not  immediately  pressing.  He  neither 
would  have  done  nor  could  have  done  more  than  to 
prevent  during  his  four  years  of  office  any  new  ac 
quisition  of  territory  in  the  slave-holding  interest,  and 
to  impose  his  veto  on  any  Bill  extending  slavery  within 
the  existing  territory  of  the  Union.  His  successor  after 
four  years  might  or  might  not  have  been  like-minded. 
He  did  not  seem  to  stand  for  any  overwhelming  force  in 
American  politics  ;  there  was  a  majority  opposed  to 
him  in  both  Houses  of  Congress  ;  a  great  majority  of  the 
Supreme  Court,  which  might  have  an  important  part  to 
play,  held  views  of  the  Constitution  opposed  to  his  ;  he 
had  been  elected  by  a  minority  only  of  the  whole 
American  people.  Why  could  not  the  Southern  States 
have  sat  still,  secure  that  no  great  harm  would  happen 
to  their  institution  for  the  present,  and  hoping  that 
their  former  ascendency  would  come  back  to  them  with 
the  changing  fortunes  of  party  strife  ?  This  is  an 
argument  which  might  be  expected  to  have  weighed 
with  Southern  statesmen  if  each  of  them  had  been 
anxious  merely  to  keep  up  the  value  of  his  own  slave 
property  for  his  own  lifetime,  but  this  was  far  from 
being  their  case.  It  is  hard  for  us  to  put  ourselves  at 
the  point  of  view  of  men  who  could  sincerely  speak  of 
their  property  in  negroes  as  theirs  by  the  "  decree  of 
the  Creator  "  ;  but  it  is  certain  that  within  the  last  two 
generations  trouble  of  mind  as  to  the  rightfulness  of 
slavery  had  died  out  in  a  large  part  of  the  South ;  the 
typical  Southern  leader  valued  the  peculiar  form  of 
society  under  which  he  lived  and  wished  to  hand  it  on 
intact  to  his  children's  children.  If  their  preposterous 
principle  be  granted,  the  most  extreme  among  them 
deserve  the  credit  of  statesmanlike  insight  for  having 
seen,  the  moment  that  Lincoln  was  elected,  that  they 
must  strike  for  their  institution  now  if  they  wished 
it  to  endure.  The  Convention  of  South  Carolina  justly 
observed  that  the  majority  in  the  North  had  voted  that 
slavery  was  sinful ;  they  had  done  little  more  than 


i8o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

express  this  abstract  opinion,  but  they  had  done  all  that. 
Lincoln's  administration  might  have  done  apparently 
little,  and  after  it  the  pendulum  would  probably  have 
swung  back.  But  the  much-talked-of  swing  of  the 
pendulum  is  the  most  delusive  of  political  phenomena  ; 
America  was  never  going  to  return  to  where  it  was 
before  this  first  explicit  national  assertion  of  the  wrong- 
fulness  of  slavery  had  been  made.  It  would  have  been 
hard  to  forecast  how  the  end  would  come,  or  how  soon ; 
but  the  end  was  certain  if  the  Southern  States  had 
elected  to  remain  the  countrymen  of  a  people  who 
were  coming  to  regard  their  fundamental  institution 
with  growing  reprobation.  Lincoln  had  said,  "  This 
government  cannot  endure  permanently,  half  slave  and 
half  free."  Lincoln  was  right,  and  so  from  their  own 
point  of  view,  that  of  men  not  brave  or  wise  enough  to 
take  in  hand  a  difficult  social  reform,  were  the  leaders 
who  declared  immediately  for  secession. 

In  no  other  contest  of  history  are  those  elements  in 
human  affairs  on  which  tragic  dramatists  are  prone  to 
dwell  so  clearly  marked  as  in  the  American  Civil  War. 
No  unsophisticated  person  now,  except  in  ignorance 
as  to  the  cause  of  the  war,  can  hesitate  as  to  which  side 
enlists  his  sympathy,  or  can  regard  the  victory  of  the 
North  otherwise  than  as  the  costly  and  imperfect 
triumph  of  the  right.  But  the  wrong  side — emphatically 
wrong — is  not  lacking  in  dignity  or  human  worth ;  the 
long-drawn  agony  of  the  struggle  is  not  purely  horrible 
to  contemplate ;  there  is  nothing  that  in  this  case 
makes  us  reluctant  to  acknowledge  the  merits  of  the 
men  who  took  arms  in  the  evil  cause.  The  experience 
as  to  the  relations  between  superior  and  inferior  races, 
which  is  now  at  the  command  of  every  intelligent 
Englishman,  forbids  us  to  think  that  the  inferiority 
of  the  negro  justified  slavery,  but  it  also  forbids  us  to 
fancy  that  men  to  whom  the  relation  of  owner  to  slave 
had  become  natural  must  themselves  have  been 
altogether  degraded.  The  men  upon  the  Southern 
side  who  can  claim  any  special  admiration  were  simple 
soldiers  who  had  no  share  in  causing  the  war ;  among 


SECESSION  181 

the  political  leaders  whom  they  served,  there  was  none 
who  stands  out  now  as  a  very  interesting  personality, 
and  their  chosen  chief  is  an  unattractive  figure  ;  but  we 
are  not  to  think  of  these  authors  of  the  war  as  a  gang 
of  hardened,  unscrupulous,  corrupted  men.  As  a  class 
they  were  reputable,  public-spirited,  and  religious  men ; 
they  served  their  cause  with  devotion  and  were  not 
wholly  to  blame  that  they  chose  it  so  ill.  The  responsi 
bility,  for  the  actual  secession  does  not  rest  in  an  especial 
degree  on  any  individual  leader.  Secession  began  rather 
with  the  spontaneous  movement  of  the  whole  community 
of  South  Carolina,  and  in  the  States  which  followed  lead 
ing  politicians  expressed  rather  than  inspired  the  general 
will.  The  guilt  which  any  of  us  can  venture  to  attribute 
for  this  action  of  a  whole  deluded  society  must  rest  on 
men  like  Calhoun,  who  in  a  previous  generation, 
while  opinion  in  the  South  was  still  to  some  extent  un 
formed,  stifled  all  thought  of  reform  and  gave  the 
semblance  of  moral  and  intellectual  justification  to  a 
system  only  susceptible  of  a  historical  excuse. 

^The  South  was  neither  base  nor  senseless,  but  it  was   / 
wrong.     To  some  minds  it  may  not  seem  to  follow  that 
it  was  well  to  resist  it  by  war,  and  indeed  at  the  time, 
as  often  happens,  people  took  up  arms  with  greater 
searchings  of  heart  upon  the  right  side  than  upon  the 
wrong.     If  the  slave  States  had  been  suffered  to  depart  j 
in  peace  they  would  have  set  up  a  new  and  peculiar 
political   society,    more   truly   held   together   than   thei 
original  Union  by  a  single  avowed  principle ;  a  nation  1 
dedicated  to  the  inequality  of  men.     It   is    not    really] 
possible  to  think  of  the  free  national  life  which  they 
could  thus  have  initiated  as  a  thing  to  be  respected  and 
preserved.     Nor  is  it  true  that  their  choice  for  them 
selves  of  this  dingy  freedom  was  no  concern  of  their 
neighbours.     We    have    seen    how    the    slave    interest 
hankered  for  enlarged  dominion  ;    and  it  is  certain  that 
the    Southern    Confederacy,    once   firmly    established, 
would  have  been  an  aggressive  and  disturbing  power 
upon    the    continent    of    America.     The    questions    of 
territorial  and   other   rights   between   it   and   the   old 


1 82  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Union  might  have  been  capable  of  satisfactory  settle 
ment  for  the  moment,  or  they  might  have  proved  as 
insoluble  as  Lincoln  thought  they  were.  But,  at  the 
best,  if  the  States  which  adhered  to  the  old  Union  had 
admitted  the  claim  of  the  first  seceding  States  to  go, 
they  could  only  have  retained  for  themselves  an  in 
secure  existence  as  a  nation,  threatened  at  each  fresh 
conflict  of  interest  or  sentiment  with  a  further  dis 
ruption  which  could  not  upon  any  principle  have  been 
resisted.  The  preceding  chapters  have  dwelt  with 
iteration  upon  the  sentiments  which  had  operated  to 
make  Americans  a  people,  and  on  the  form  and  the 
degree  in  which  those  sentiments  animated  the  mind  of 
Lincoln.  Only  so  perhaps  can  we  fully  appreciate  for 
what  the  people  of  the  North  fought.  It  is  inaccurate, 
though  not  gravely  misleading,  to  say  that  they  fought 
against  slavery.  It  would  be  wholly  false  to  say  that 
they  fought  for  mere  dominion.  They  fought  to  preserve 
and  complete  a  political  unity  nobly  conceived  by  those 
who  had  done  most  to  create  it,  and  capable,  as  the 
sequel  showed,  of  a  permanent  and  a  healthy  con 
tinuance. 

And  it  must  never  be  forgotten,  if  we  wish  to  enter 
into  the  spirit  which  sustained  the  North  in  its  struggle, 
that  loyalty  for  Union  had  a  larger  aspect  than  that 
of  mere  allegiance  to  a  particular  authority.  Vividly 
present  to  the  mind  of  some  few,  vaguely  but  honestly 
present  to  the  mind  of  a  great  multitude,  was  the  sense 
that  even  had  slavery  not  entered  into  the  question  a 
larger  cause  than  that  of  their  recent  Union  was  bound 
up  with  the  issues  of  the  war.  The  Government  of  the 
United  States  had  been  the  first  and  most  famous 
attempt  in  a  great  modern  country  to  secure  government 
by  the  will  of  the  mass  of  the  people.  If  in  this  crucial 
instance  such  a  Government  were  seen  to  be  intolerably 
weak,  if  it  was  found  to  be  at  the  mercy  of  the  first 
powerful  minority  which  seized  a  worked-up  occasion 
to  rebel,  what  they  had  learnt  to  think  the  most  hopeful 
agency  for  the  uplifting  of  man  everywhere  would  for 
ages  to  come  have  proved  a  failure.  This  feeling  could 


SECESSION  183 

not  be  stronger  in  any  American  than  it  was  in  Lincoln 
himself.  "  It  has  long  been  a  question,"  he  said, 
"  whether  any  Government  which  is  not  too  strong  for 
the  liberties  of  the  people  can  be  strong  enough  to 
maintain  itself."  There  is  one  marked  feature  of  his 
patriotism,  which  could  be  illustrated  by  abundance  of 
phrases  from  his  speeches  and  letters,  and  which  the 
people  of  several  countries  of  Europe  can  appreciate 
to-day.  His  affection  for  his  own  country  and  its* 
institutions  is  curiously  dependent  upon  a  wider  cause 
of  human  good,  and  is  not  a  whit  the  less  intense  for 
that.  There  is  perhaps  no  better  expression  of  this 
widespread  feeling  in  the  North  than  the  unprepared 
speech  which  he  delivered  on  his  way  to  become 
President,  in  the  Hall  of  Independence  at  Philadelphia,  in 
which  the  Declaration  of  Independence  had  been  signed. 
"  I  have  never,"  he  said,  "  had  a  feeling  politically  that 
did  not  spring  from  the  sentiments  embodied  in  the 
Declaration  of  Independence.  I  have  often  pondered 
over  the  dangers  which  were  incurred  by  the  men  who 
assembled  here  and  framed  and  adopted  that  Declaration 
of  Independence.  I  have  pondered  over  the  toils  that 
were  endured  by  the  officers  and  soldiers  of  the  army 
who  achieved  that  independence.  I  have  often  inquired 
of  myself  what  great  principle  or  idea  it  was  that  kept 
the  Confederacy  so  long  together.  It  was  not  the  mere 
matter  of  separation  of  the  colonies  from  the  motherland, 
it  was  the  sentiment  in  the  Declaration  of  Independence 
which  gave  liberty,  not  alone  to  the  people  of  this 
country,  but  I  hope  to  the  world,  for  all  future  time. 
It  was  that  which  gave  promise  that  in  due  time  the 
weight  would  be  lifted  from  the  shoulders  of  all  men." 

2.  The  Progress  of  Secession. 

So  much  for  the  broad  causes  without  which  there 
could  have  been  no  Civil  War  in  America.  We  have 
now  to  sketch  the  process  by  which  the  fuel  was  kindled. 
It  will  be  remembered  that  the  President  elected  in 
November  does  not  enter  upon  his  office  for  nearly 
four  months.  For  that  time,  therefore,  the  conduct  of 


1 84  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

government  lay  in  the  hands  of  President  Buchanan, 
who,  for  all  his  past  subserviency  to  Southern  interests, 
believed  and  said  that  secession  was  absolutely  unlawful. 
Several  members  of  his  Cabinet  were  Southerners  who 
favoured  secession ;  but  the  only  considerable  man 
among  them,  Cobb  of  Georgia,  soon  declared  that  his 
loyalty  to  his  own  State  was  not  compatible  with  his 
office  and  resigned  ;  and,  though  others,  including  the 
Secretary  for  War,  hung  on  to  their  position,  it  does  not 
appear  that  they  influenced  Buchanan  much,  or  that 
their  somewhat  dubious  conduct  while  they  remained 
was  of  great  importance.  Black,  the  Attorney-General, 
and  Cass,  the  Secretary  of  State,  who,  however,  resigned 
when  his  advice  was  disregarded,  were  not  only  loyal 
to  the  Union,  but  anxious  that  the  Government  should 
do  everything  that  seemed  necessary  in  its  defence. 
Thus  this  administration,  hitherto  Southern  in  its 
sympathies,  must  be  regarded  for  its  remaining  months 
as  standing  for  the  Union,  so  far  as  it  stood  for  any 
thing.  Lincoln  meanwhile  had  little  that  he  could  do, 
but  to  watch  events  and  prepare.  There  was,  neverthe 
less,  a  point  in  the  negotiations  which  took  place  between 
parties  at  which  he  took  on  himself  a  tremendous 
responsibility  and  at  which  his  action  was  probably 
decisive  of  all  that  followed. 

The  Presidential  election  took  place  on  November  6, 
1860.  On  November  10  the  Legislature  of  South  Caro 
lina,  which  had  remained  in  session  for  this  purpose, 
convened  a  specially  elected  Convention  of  the  State  to 
decide  upon  the  question  of  secession.  Slave-owners 
and  poor  whites,  young  and  old,  street  rabble,  persons 
of  fashion,  politicians  and  clergy,  the  whole  people  of 
this  peculiar  State,  distinguished  in  some  marked  respects 
even  from  its  nearest  neighbours,  received  the  action 
of  the  Legislature  with  enthusiastic  but  grave  approval. 
It  was  not  till  December  20  that  the  Convention  could 
pass  its  formal  "  Ordinance  of  Secession,"  but  there 
was  never  for  a  moment  any  doubt  as  to  what  it  would 
do.  The  question  was  what  other  States  would  follow 
the  example  of  South  Carolina.  There  ensued  in  all 


SECESSION  185 

the  Southern  States  earnest  discussion  as  to  whether 
to  secede  or  not,  and  in  the  North,  on  which  the  action 
of  South  Carolina,  however  easily  it  might  have  been 
foretold,  came  as  a  shock,  great  bewilderment  as  to 
what  was  to  be  done.  As  has  been  said,  there  was  in 
the  South  generally  no  disposition  to  give  up  Southern 
claims,  no  doubt  as  to  the  right  of  secession,  and  no 
fundamental  and  overriding  loyalty  to  the  Union,  but 
there  was  a  considerable  reluctance  to  give  up  the  Union 
and  much  doubt  as  to  whether  secession  was  really  wise  ; 
there  was  in  the  North  among  those  who  then  made  them 
selves  heard,  no  doubt  whatever  as  to  the  loyalty  due  to 
the  Union,  but  there  was,  apart  from  previous  differences 
about  slavery,  every  possible  variety  and  fluctuation  of 
opinion  as  to  the  right  way  of  dealing  with  States  which 
should  secede  or  rebel.  In  certain  border  States,  few  in 
number  but  likely  to  play  an  important  part  in  civil  war, 
Northern  and  Southern  elements  were  mingled.  Amid 
loud  and  distracted  discussion,  public  and  private, 
leaders  of  the  several  parties  and  of  the  two  sections  of 
the  country  conducted  earnest  negotiations  in  the  hope 
of  finding  a  peaceable  settlement,  and  when  Congress 
met,  early  in  December,  their  debates  took  a  formal 
shape  in  committees  appointed  by  the  Senate  and  by 
the  House. 

Meanwhile  the  President  was  called  upon  to  deal  with 
the  problem  presented  for  the  Executive  Government  of 
the  Union  by  the  action  of  South  Carolina.  It  may  be  \ 
observed  that  if  he  had  given  his  mind  to  the  military 
measures  required  to  meet  the  possible  future,  the 
North,  which  in  the  end  had  his  entire  sympathy, 
would  have  begun  the  war  with  that  advantage  in 
preparation  which,  as  it  was,  was  gained  by  the  South. 
In  this  respect  he  did  nothing.  But,  apart  from  this,  if 
he  had  taken  up  a  clear  and  comprehensible  attitude 
towards  South  Carolina  and  had  given  a  lead  to 
Unionist  sympathy,  he  would  have  consolidated  public 
opinion  in  the  North,  and  he  would  have  greatly 
strengthened  those  in  the  South  who  remained  averse 
to  secession.  There  would  have  been  a  considerable 


1 86  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

further  secession,  but  in  all  likelihood  it  would  not 
have  become  so  formidable  as  it  did.  As  it  was,  the 
movement  for  secession  proceeded  with  all  the  proud 
confidence  that  can  be  felt  in  a  right  which  is  not 
challenged,  and  the  people  of  the  South  were  not 
aware,  though  shrewd  leaders  like  Jefferson  Davis 
knew  it  well,  of  the  risk  they  would  encounter  till  they 
had  committed  themselves  to  defying  it. 

The  problem  before  Buchanan  was  the  same  which, 
aggravated  by  his  failure  to  deal  with  it,  confronted 
Lincoln  when  he  came  into  office,  and  it  must  be  clearly 
understood.  The  secession  of  South  Carolina  was  not  a 
movement  which  could  at  once  be  quelled  by  prompt 
measures  of  repression.  Even  if  sufficient  military 
force  and  apt  forms  of  law  had  existed  for  taking  such 
measures,  they  would  have  united  the  South  in  support 
of  South  Carolina,  and  alienated  the  North,  which  was 
anxious  for  conciliation.  Yet  it  was  possible  for  the 
Government  of  the  Union,  while  patiently  abstaining 
from  violent  or  provocative  action,  to  make  plain  that  I 
in  the  last  resort  it  would  maintain  its  rights  in  South 
Carolina  with  its  full  strength.  The  main  dealings 
of  the  Union  authorities  with  the  people  of  a  State 
came  under  a  very  few  heads.  There  were  local 
Federal  Courts  to  try  certain  limited  classes  of  issues ; 
jurors,  of  course,  could  not  be  compelled  to  serve 
in  these  nor  parties  to  appear.  There  was  the  postal 
service ;  the  people  of  South  Carolina  did  not  at 
present  interfere  with  this  source  of  convenience  to 
themselves  and  of  revenue  to  the  Union.  There  were 
customs  duties  to  be  collected  at  the  ports,  and  there 
were  forts  at  the  entrance  of  the  harbour  in  Charleston, 
South  Carolina,  as  well  as  forts,  dockyards  and  arsenals 
of  the  United  States  at  a  number  of  points  in  the 
Southern  States  ;  the  Government  should  quietly  but 
openly  have  taken  steps  to  ensure  that  the  collection 
should  go  on  unmolested,  and  that  the  forts  and  the 
like  should  be  made  safe  from  attack,  in  South  Carolina 
and  everywhere  else  where  they  were  likely  to  be 
threatened.  Measures  of  this  sort  were  early  urged 


SECESSION  187 

upon  Buchanan  by  Scott,  the  Lieutenant-General  (that 
is,  •  Second  in  Command  under  the  President)  of  the 
Army,  who  had  been  the  officer  that  carried  out  Jackson's 
military  dispositions  when  secession  was  threatened  in 
South  Carolina  thirty  years  before,  and  by  other  officers 
concerned,  particularly  by  Major  Anderson,  a  keen 
Southerner,  but  a  keen  soldier,  commanding  the  forts  at 
Charleston,  and  by  Cass  and  Black  in  his  Cabinet. 
Public  opinion  in  the  North  demanded  such  measures. 

If  further  action  than  the  proper  manning  and  supply 
of  certain  forts  had  been  in  contemplation,  an  em 
barrassing  legal  question  would  have  arisen.  In  the 
opinion  of  the  Attorney-General,  of  leading  Democrats 
like  Cass  and  Douglas,  and  apparently  of  most  legal 
authorities  of  every  party,  there  was  an  important 
distinction,  puzzling  to  an  English  lawyer  even  if  he  is 
versed  in  the  American  Constitution,  between  the  steps 
which  the  Government  might  justly  take  in  self- 
protection,  and  measures  which  could  be  regarded  as 
coercion  of  the  State  of  South  Carolina  as  such.  These 
latter  would  be  unlawful.  Buchanan,  instead  of  acting 
on  or  declaring  his  intentions,  entertained  Congress, 
which  met  early  in  December,  with  a  Message,  laying 
down  very  clearly  the  illegality  of  secession,  but  dis 
cussing  at  large  this  abstract  question  of  the  precise 
powers  of  the  Executive  in  resisting  secession.  The 
legal  question  will  not  further  concern  us  because  the 
distinction  which  it  was  really  intended  to  draw  between 
lawful  and  unlawful  measures  against  secession  quite 
coincided,  in  its  practical  application,  with  what  com 
mon  sense  and  just  feeling  would  in  these  peculiar  cir 
cumstances  have  dictated.  But,  as  a  natural  consequence 
of  such  discussion,  an  impression  was  spread  abroad  of 
the  illegality  of  something  vaguely  called  coercion,  and 
of  the  shadowy  nature  of  any  power  which  the  Govern 
ment  claimed. 

Up  to  Lincoln's  inauguration  the  story  of  the  Charles 
ton  forts,  of  which  one,  lying  on  an  island  in  the  mouth 
of  the  harbour,  was  the  famous  Fort  Sumter,  is  briefly 
this.  Buchanan  was  early  informed  that  if  the  Union 


1 88  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Government  desired  to  hold  them,  troops  and  ships  of  war 
should  instantly  be  sent.  Congressmen  from  South 
Carolina  remaining  in  Washington  came  to  him  and 
represented  that  their  State  regarded  these  forts  upon 
its  soil  as  their  own  ;  they  gave  assurances  that  there 
would  be  no  attack  on  the  forts  if  the  existing  military 
situation  was  not  altered,  and  they  tried  to  get  a 
promise  that  the  forts  should  not  be  reinforced. 
Buchanan  would  give  them  no  promise,  but  he  equally 
refused  the  entreaties  of  Scott  and  his  own  principal 
ministers  that  he  should  reinforce  the  forts,  because 
he  declared  that  this  would  precipitate  a  conflict. 
Towards  the  end  of  the  year  Major  Anderson,  not  having 
men  enough  to  hold  all  the  forts  if,  as  he  expected, 
they  were  attacked,  withdrew  his  whole  force  to  Fort 
Sumter,  which  he  thought  the  most  defensible,  dis 
mantling  the  principal  other  fort.  The  Governor  of 
South  Carolina  protested  against  this  as  a  violation  of  a 
supposed  understanding  with  the  President,  and  seized 
upon  the  United  States  arsenal  and  the  custom  house, 
taking  the  revenue  officers  into  State  service.  Com 
missioners  had  previously  gone  from  South  Carolina 
to  Washington  to  request  the  surrender  of  the  forts, 
upon  terms  of  payment  for  property  ;  they  now  declared 
that  Anderson's  withdrawal,  as  putting  him  in  a  better 
position  for  defence,  was  an  act  of  war,  and  demanded 
that  he  should  be  ordered  to  retire  to  the  mainland. 
Buchanan  wavered  ;  decided  to  yield  to  them  on  this 
last  point  ;  ultimately,  on  the  last  day  of  1860,  yielded 
instead  to  severe  pressure  from  Black,  and  decided  to 
reinforce  Anderson  on  Fort  Sumter.  The  actual  attempt 
to  reinforce  him  was  bungled  ;  a  transport  sent  for  this 
purpose  was  fired  upon  by  the  South  Carolina  forces, 
and  returned  idle.  This  first  act  of  war,  for  some 
curious  reason,  caused  no  excitement.  The  people  of 
the  North  were  intensely  relieved  that  Buchanan  had 
not  yielded  to  whatever  South  Carolina  might  demand, 
and,  being  prone  to  forgive  and  to  applaud,  seem  for  a 
time  to  have  experienced  a  thrill  of  glory  in  the  thought 
that  the  national  administration  had  a  mind.  Dix, 


SECESSION  189 

the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  elated  them  yet  further 
by  telegraphing  to  a  Treasury  official  at  New  Orleans, 
"  If  any  one  attempts  to  haul  down  the  American  flag, 
shoot  him  on  the  spot."  But  Anderson  remained 
without  reinforcements  or  further  provisions  when 
Lincoln  entered  office  ;  and  troops  in  the  service  first 
of  South  Carolina  and  afterwards  of  the  Southern 
Confederacy,  which  was  formed  in  February,  erected 
batteries  and  prepared  to  bombard  Fort  Sumter. 

No  possible  plea  for  President  Buchanan  can  make 
him  rank  among  those  who  have  held  high  office  with 
any  credit  at  all,  but  he  must  at  once  be  acquitted  of 
any  intentional  treachery  to  the  Union.  It  is  agreed 
that  he  was  a  truthful  and  sincere  man,  and  there  is 
something  pleasant  in  the  simple  avowal  he  made  to  a 
Southern  negotiator  who  was  pressing  him  for  some 
instant  concession,  that  he  always  said  his  prayers 
before  deciding  any  important  matter  of  State.  His 
previous  dealings  with  Kansas  would  suggest  to  us 
robust  unscrupulousness,  but  it  seems  that  he  had  quite 
given  his  judgment  over  into  the  keeping  of  a  little 
group  of  Southern  Senators.  Now  that  he  was  deprived 
of  this  help,  he  had  only  enough  will  left  to  be  obstinate 
against  other  advice.  It  is  suggested  that  he  had  now 
but  one  motive,  the  desire  that  the  struggle  should  break 
out  in  his  successor's  time  rather  than  his  own.  Even 
this  is  perhaps  to  judge  Buchanan's  notorious  and 
calamitous  laches  unfairly.  Any  action  that  he  took 
must  to  a  certain  extent  have  been  provocative,  and  he 
knew  it,  and  he  may  have  clung  to  the  hope  that  by 
sheer  inaction  he  would  give  time  for  some  possible 
forces  of  reason  and  conciliation  to  work.  If  so,  he 
was  wrong,  but  similar  and  about  as  foolish  hopes 
paralysed  Lincoln's  Cabinet  (and  to  a  less  but  still  very 
dangerous  degree  Lincoln  himself)  when  they  took  up 
the  problem  which  Buchanan's  neglect  had  made  more 
urgent.  Buchanan  had  in  this  instance  the  advantage 
of  far  better  advice,  but  this  silly  old  man  must  not  be 
gibbeted  and  Lincoln  left  free  from  criticism  for  his 
part  in  the  same  transaction.  Both  Presidents  hesitated 


190  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

where  to  us  who  look  back  the  case  seems  clear.  The 
circumstances  had  altered  in  some  respects  when  Lincoln 
came  in,  but  it  is  only  upon  a  somewhat  broad  survey  of 
the  governing  tendencies  of  Lincoln's  administration 
and  of  its  mighty  result  in  the  mass  that  we  discover 
what  really  distinguishes  his  slowness  of  action  in  such 
cases  as  this  from  the  hesitation  of  a  man  like  Buchanan. 
Buchanan  waited  in  the  hope  of  avoiding  action,  Lincoln 
with  the  firm  intention  to  see  his  path  in  the  fullest 
light  he  could  get. 

From  an  early  date  in  November,  1860,  every  effort 
was  made,  by  men  too  numerous  to  mention,  to  devise 
if  possible  such  a  settlement  of  what  were  now  called 
the  grievances  of  the  South  as  would  prevent  any  other 
State  from  following  the  example  of  South  Carolina. 
Apart  from  the  intangible  difference  presented  by  much 
disapprobation  of  slavery  in  the  North  and  growing 
resentment  in  the  South  as  this  disapprobation  grew 
louder,  the  solid  ground  of  dispute  concerned  the 
position  of  slavery  in  the  existing  Territories  and  future- 
acquisitions  of  the  United  States  Government  ;  the 
quarrel  arose  from  the  election  of  a  President  pledged  to 
use  whatever  power  he  had,  though  indeed  that  might 
prove  little,  to  prevent  the  further  extension  of  slavery  ; 
and  we  may  almost  confine  our  attention  to  this  point. 
Other  points  came  into  discussion.  Several  of  the 
Northern  States  had  "  Personal  Liberty  Laws "  ex 
pressly  devised  to  impede  the  execution  of  the  Federal 
law  of  1850  as  to  fugitive  slaves;  Some  attention  was 
devoted  to  these,  especially  by  Alexander  Stephens, 
who,  as  the  Southern  leader  most  opposed  to  immediate 
secession,  wished  to  direct  men's  minds  to  a  grievance 
that  could  be  remedied.  Lincoln,  who  had  always 
said  that,  though  the  Fugitive  Slave  Law  should  be 
made  just  and  seemly,  it  ought  in  substance  to  be 
enforced,  made  clear  again  that  he  thought  such 
"  Personal  Liberty  Laws  "  should  be  amended,  though 
he  protested  that  it  was  not  for  him  as  President-Elect 
to  advise  the  State  Legislatures  on  their  own  business. 
The  Republicans  generally  agreed.  Some  of  the  States 


SECESSION  191 

concerned  actually  began  amending  their  laws.  Thus, 
if  the  disquiet  of  the  South  had  depended  on  this 
grievance,  the  cause  of  disquiet  would  no  doubt  have 
been  removed.  Again  the  Republican  leaders,  includ 
ing  Lincoln  in  particular,  let  there  be  no  ground 
for  thinking  that  an  attack  was  intended  upon  slavery 
in  the  States  where  it  was  established  ;  they  offered 
eventually  to  give  the  most  solemn  pledge  possible  in 
this  matter  by  passing  an  Amendment  of  the  Con 
stitution  declaring  that  it  should  never  be  altered  so  as 
to  take  away  the  independence  of  the  existing  slave 
States  as  to  this  portion  of  their  democratic  institutions. 
Lincoln  indeed  refused  on  several  occasions  to  make 
any  fresh  public  disclaimer  of  an  intention  to  attack 
existing  institutions.  His  views  were  "  open  to  all  who 
will  read."  "  For  the  good  men  in  the  South,"  he 
writes  privately,  " — I  regard  the  majority  of  them  as  such 
— I  have  no  objection  to  repeat  them  seventy  times 
seven.  But  I  have  bad  men  to  deal  with  both  North 
and  South  ;  men  who  are  eager  for  something  new  upon 
which  to  base  new  misrepresentations  ;  men  who  would 
like  to  frighten  me,  or  at  least  fix  upon  me  the  character 
of  timidity  and  cowardice."  Nevertheless  he  endeavoured 
constantly  in  private  correspondence  to  nagQW__and 
define_the_issue,  which,  as  he  insisted,  concerned  only 
the  territorial  extension  of  slavery. 

The  most  serious  of  the  negotiations  that  took  place, 
and  to  which  most  hope  was  attached,  consisted  in  the 
deliberations  of  a  committee  of  thirteen  appointed  by 
the  Senate  in  December,  1860,  which  took  for  its 
guidance  a  detailed  scheme  of  compromise  put  forward 
by  Senator  Crittenden,  of  Kentucky.  The  efforts  of  this 
committee  to  come  to  an  agreement  broke  down  at  the 
outset  upon  the  question  of  the  Territories,  and  the 
responsibility,  for  good  or  for  evil,  of  bringing  them  to 
an  end  must  probably  be  attributed  to  the  advice  of  Lin 
coln.  Crittenden's  first  proposal  was  that  there  should 
be  a  Constitutional  Amendment  declaring  that  slavery 
should  be  prohibited  "  in  all  the  territory  of  the  United 
States,  now  held  or  hereafter  acquired,  north  of  latitude 


192  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

36°  30'  " — (the  limit  fixed  in  the  Missouri  Compro 
mise,  but  restricted  then  to  the  Louisiana  purchase) — 
while  in  all  territory,  now  held  or  thereafter  acquired 
south  of  that  line,  it  should  be  permitted.  Crittenden 
also  proposed  that  when  a  Territory  on  either  side  of  the 
line  became  a  State,  it  should  become  free  to  decide  the 
question  for  itself  ;  but  the  discussion  never  reached  this 
point.  On  the  proposal  as  to  the  Territories  there  seemed 
at  first  to  be  a  prospect  that  the  Republicans  would 
agree,  in  which  case  the  South  might  very  likely  have 
agreed  too.  The  desire  for  peace  was  intensely  strong 
among  the  commercial  men  of  New  York  and  other 
cities,  and  it  affected  the  great  political  managers  and 
the  statesmen  who,  like  Seward  himself,  were  in  close 
touch  with  this  commercial  influence.  Tenacious  ad 
herence  to  declared  principle  may  have  been  as  strong 
in  country  districts  as  the  desire  for  accommodation  was 
in  these  cities,  but  it  was  at  any  rate  far  less  vocal, 
and  on  the  whole  it  seems  that  compromise  was  then  in 
the  air.  It  seemed  clear  from  the  expressed  opinions  of 
his  closest  allies  that  Seward  would  support  this  com 
promise.  Now  Seward  just  at  this  time  received 
Lincoln's  offer  of  the  office  of  Secretary  of  State,  a  great 
office  and  one  in  which  Seward  expected  to  rule  Lincoln 
and  the  country,  but  in  accepting  which,  as  he  did,  he 
made  it  incumbent  on  himself  not  to  part  company  at 
once  with  the  man  who  would  be  nominally  his  chief. 
Then  there  occurred  a  visit  paid  on  Seward's  behalf  by 
his  friend  Thurlow  Weed,  an  astute  political  manager 
but  also  an  able  statesman,  to  Lincoln  at  Springfield. 
Weed  brought  back  a  written  statement  of  Lincoln's 
views.  Seward's  support  was  not  given  to  the  com 
promise  ;  nor  naturally  was  that  of  the  more  radical 
Republicans,  to  use  a  term  which  now  became  common  ; 
and  the  Committee  of  thirteen  found  itself  unable  to 
agree. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  repeat  what  Lincoln's  conviction 
on  this,  to  him  the  one  essential  point  of  policy,  was,  or 
to  quote  from  the  numerous  letters  in  which  from  the 
time  of  his  nomination  he  tried  to  keep  the  minds  of  his 


SECESSION  193 

friends  firm  on  this  single  principle,  and  to  show  them 
that  if  there  were  the  slightest  further  yielding  as  to 
this,  save  indeed  as  to  the  peculiar  case  of  New  Mexico, 
which  did  not  matter,  and  which  perhaps  he  regarded  as 
conceded  already,  the  Southern  policy  of  extending 
slavery  and  of  "  filibustering  "  against  neighbouring 
counties  for  that  purpose  would  revive  in  full  force,  and 
the  whole  labour  of  the  Republican  movement  would 
have  to  begin  over  again.  Since  his  election  he  had 
been  writing  also  to  Southern  politicians  who  were 
personally  friendly,  to  Gilmer  of  North  Carolina,  to 
whom  he  offered  Cabinet  office,  and  to  Stephens,  making 
absolutely  plain  that  his  difference  with  them  lay  in 
this  one  point,  but  making  it  no  less  plain  that  on  this 
point  he  was,  with  entire  respect  to  them,  immovable. 
Now,  on  December  22,  the  New  Tork  Tribune  was 
"  enabled  to  state  that  Mr.  Lincoln  stands  now  as 
he  stood  in  May  last,  square  upon  the  Republican 
platform."  The  writing  that.  Weed  brought  to  NSeward 
must  have  said,  perhaps  more  elaborately,  the  same. 
If  Lincoln  had  not  stood  square  upon  that  platform 
there  were  others  like  Senator  Wade  of  Ohio  and  Senator 
Grimes  of  Iowa  who  might  have  done  so  and  might  have 
been  able  to  wreck  the  compromise.  Lincoln,  however, 
did  wreck  it,  at  a  time  when  it  seemed  likely  to  succeed, 
and  it  is  most  probable  that  thereby  he  caused  the  Civil 
War.  It  cannot  be  said  that  he  definitely  expected  the 
Civil  War.  Probably  he  avoided  making  any  definite 
forecast  ;  but  he  expressed  no  alarm,  and  he  privately 
told  a  friend  about  this  time  that  "  he  could  not  in  his 
heart  believe  that  the  South  designed  the  overthrow  of 
the  Government."  But,  if  he  had  in  his  heart  believed 
it,  nothing  in  his  life  gives  reason  to  think  that  he  would 
have  been  more  anxious  to  conciliate  the  South  ;  on  the 
contrary,  it  is  in  line  with  all  we  know  of  his  feelings 
to  suppose  that  he  would  have  thought  firmness  all  the 
more  imperative.  We  cannot  recall  the  solemnity  of 
his  long-considered  speech  about  ''  a  house  divided 
against  itself,"  with  which  all  his  words  and  acts 
accorded,  without  seeing  that,  if  perhaps  he  speculated 


194  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

little  about  the  risks,  he  was  prepared  to  face  them 
whatever  they  were.  Doubtless  he  took  a  heavy 
responsibility,  but  it  is  painful  to  find  honourable 
historians,  who  heartily  dislike  the  cause  of  slavery, 
capable  to-day  of  wondering  whether  he  was  right  to  do 
so.  "  If  he  had  not  stood  square  "  in  December  upon 
the  same  "  platform  "  on  which  he  had  stood  in  May, 
if  he  had  preferred  to  enrol  himself  among  those  states 
men  of  all  countries  whose  strongest  words  are  uttered 
for  their  own  subsequent  enjoyment  in  eating  them, 
he  might  conceivably  have  saved  much  bloodshed,  but 
he  would  not  have  left  the  United  States  a  country  of 
which  any  good  man  was  proud  to  be  a  citizen. 

Thus,  by  the  end  of  1860,  the  bottom  was  really  out 
of  the  policy  of  compromise,  and  it  is  not  worth  while  to 
examine  the  praiseworthy  efforts  that  were  still  made 
for  it  while  State  after  State  in  the  South  was  deciding 
to  secede.  One  interesting  proposal,  which  was  aired  in 
January,  1861,  deserves  notice,  namely,  that  the  terms 
of  compromise  proposed  by  Crittenden  should  have  been 
submitted  to  a  vote  of  the  whole  people.  It  was  not 
passed.  Seward,  whom  many  people  now  thought 
likely  to  catch  at  any  and  every  proposal  for  a  settlement, 
said  afterwards  with  justice  that  it  was  "  uncon 
stitutional  and  ineffectual."  Ineffectual  it  would  have 
been  in  this  sense  :  the  compromise  would  in  all 
probability  have  been  carried  by  a  majority  consisting 
of  men  in  the  border  States  and  of  all  those  elsewhere 
who,  though  they  feared  war  and  desired  good  feeling, 
had  no  further  definite  opinion  upon  the  chief  questions 
at  issue  ;  but  it  would  have  left  a  local  majority  in 
many  of  the  Southern  States  and  a  local  majority  in 
many  of  the  Northern  States  as  irreconcilable  with  each 
other  as  ever.  It  was  opposed  also  to  the  spirit  of  the 
Constitution.  In  a  great  country  where  the  people 
with  infinitely  varied  interests  and  opinions  can  slowly 
make  their  predominant  wishes  appear,  but  cannot 
really_take  counsej^together^  and  give  ^  firrp  cierisjoji 
ifp^n^gny_ f ,m ^rg^n ry,  tb frre,  may  be ^exceptional  cases 
wrTerTapopular  vote  on  a  defined  issue  would  be  valuable. 


SECESSION  195 

significant,  desired  by  the  people  themselves  ;  but  the 
machinery  of  representative  government,  however  faulty, 
is  the  only  machinery  by  which  the  people  can  in  some 
sense  govern  itself,  instead  of  making  itself  ungovernable. 
Above  all,  in  a  serious  crisis  it  is  supremely  repugnant 
to  the  spirit  of  popular  government  that  the  men  chosen 
by  a  people  to  govern  it  should  throw  their  responsibility 
back  "art  the  heads  of  the  electors.  It  is  well  to  be  clear 
as  to  the  kind  of  proceeding  which  the  authors  of  this 
proposal  were  really  advocating  :  a  statesman  has  come 
before  the  ordinary  citizen  with  a  definite  statement  of 
the  principle  on  which  he  would  act,  and  an  ordinary 
citizen  has  thereupon  taken  his  part  in  entrusting  him 
with  power  ;  then  comes  the  moment  for  the  statesman 
to  carry  out  his  principle,  and  the  latent  opposition 
becomes  of  necessity  more  alarming  ;  the  statesman  is 
therefore  to  say  to  the  ordinary  citizen,  "  This  is  a 
more  difficult  matter  than  I  thought ;  and  if  I  am  to 
act  as  I  said  I  would,  take  on  yourself  the  responsibility 
which  I  recently  put  myself  forward  to  bear."  The 
ordinary  citizen  will  naturally  as  a  rule  decline  a 
responsibility  thus  offered  him,  but  he  will  not  be  grate 
ful  for  the  offer  or  glad  to  be  a  forced  accomplice  in  this 
process  of  indecision. 

If  we  could  determine  the  prevailing  sentiment  in  the 
North  at  some  particular  moment  during  the  crisis,  it 
would  probably  represent  what  very  few  individual  men 
continued  to  think  for  six  months  together.  Early  in 
the  crisis  some  strong  opponents  of  slavery  were  for 
letting  the  South  go,  declaring  as  did  Horace  Greeley 
of  the  New  York  Tribune,  that  "  they  would  not  be 
citizens  of  a  Republic  of  which  one  part  was  pinned 
to  the  other  part  with  bayonets  "  ;  but  this  sentiment 
seems  soon  to  have  given  way  when  the  same  men 
began  to  consider,  as  Lincoln  had  considered,  whether 
an  agreement  to  sever  the  Union  between  the  States, 
with  the  difficult  adjustment  of  mutual  interests  which 
it  would  have  involved,  could  be  so  effected  as  to  secure 
a  lasting  peace.  A  blind  rage  on  behalf  of  conciliation 
broke  out  later  in  prosperous  business  men  in  great 


196  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

towns — even  in  Boston  it  is  related  that  "  Beacon  Street 
aristocrats  "  broke  up  a  meeting  to  commemorate  John 
Brown  on  the  anniversary  of  his  death,  and  grave 
persons  thought  the  meeting  an  outrage.  Waves  of 
eager  desire  for  compromise  passed  over  the  Northern 
community.  Observers  at  the  time  and  historians  after 
are  easily  mistaken  as  to  popular  feeling  ;  the  acute 
fluctuations  of  opinion  inevitable  among  journalists  and 
in  any  sort  of  circle  where  men  are  constantly  meeting 
and  talking  politics,  may  leave  the  great  mass  of  quiet 
folk  almost  unaffected.  We  may  be  sure  that  there  was 
a  considerable  body  of  steady  opinion  very  much  in 
accord  with  Lincoln ;  this  should  not  be  forgotten,  but 
it  must  not  be  supposed  that  it  prevailed  constantly. 
On  the  contrary,  it  was  inherent  in  the  nature  of  the 
crisis  that  opinion  wavered  and  swayed.  We  should 
miss  the  whole  significance  of  Lincoln's  story  if  we  did 
not  think  of  the  North  now  and  to  the  end  of  the  war  as 
exposed  to  disunion,  hesitation,  and  quick  reaction.  If 
at  tmV  time  a  sufficiently  authoritative  leader  with 
sufficiently  determined  timidity  had  inaugurated  a  policy 
of  stampede,  he  might  have  had  a  vast  and  tumultuous 
following.  Only  Ms  following  would  quickly,  if  too  late, 
have  repentecl/  What  was  wanted,  if  the  people  of  the 
North  were  to  have  what  most  justly  might  be  called 
their  way,  was  a  leader  who  would  not  seem  to  hurry 
them  along,  nor  yet  be  ever  looking  round  to  see  if  they 
followed,  but  just  go  groping  forward  among  the  in 
numerable  obstacles,  guided  by  such  principles  of  good 
sense  and  of  right  as  would  perhaps  on  the  whole  and  in 
the  long  run  be  approved  by  the  maturer  thought  of 
most  men ;  and  Lincoln  was  such  a  leader. 

When  we  turn  to  the  South,  where,  as  has  been  said, 
the  movement  for  secession  was  making  steady  though 
not  unopposed  progress,  we  have  indeed  to  make  ex 
ceptions  to  any  sweeping  statement,  but  we  must  recog 
nise  a  far  more  clearly  defined  and  far  more  prevailing 
general  opinion.  We  may  set  aside  for  the  moment 
the  border  slave  States  of  Maryland,  Virginia,  Kentucky, 
and  Missouri,  each  of  which  has  a  distinct  and  an 


SECESSION  197 

important  history.  Delaware  belonged  in  effect  to  the 
North.  In  Texas  there  were  peculiar  conditions,  and 
Texas  had  an  interesting  history  of  its  own  in  this 
matter,  but  may  be  treated  as  remote.  There  was  also, 
as  has  been  said,  a  highland  region  covering  the  west  of 
Virginia  and  the  east  of  Kentucky  but  reaching  far 
south  into  the  northern  part  of  Alabama.  Looking  at 
the  pathetic  spectacle  of  enduring  heroism  in  a  mistaken 
cause  which  the  South  presented,  many  people  have 
been  ready  to  suppose  that  it  was  manoeuvred  and 
tricked  into  its  folly  by  its  politicians  and  might  have 
recovered  itself  from  it  if  the  North  and  the  Government 
had  exercised  greater  patience  and  given  it  time.  In 
support  of  this  view  instances  are  cited  of  strong  Unionist 
feeling  in  the  South.  Such  instances  probably  belong  to 
the  peculiar  people  of  this  highland  country,  or  else  to 
the  mixed  and  more  or  less  neutral  population  that 
might  be  found  at  New  Orleans  or  trading  along  the 
Mississippi.  There  remains  a  solid  and  far  larger  South 
in  which  indeed  (except  for  South  Carolina)  dominant 
Southern  policy  was  briskly  debated,  but  as  a  question 
of  time,  degree,  and  expediency.  Three  mental  forces 
worked  for  the  same  end  :  the  alarmed  vested  interest 
of  the  people  of  substance,  aristocratic  and  otherwise  ; 
the  racial  sentiment  of  the  poor  whites,  a  sentiment 
often  strongest  in  those  who  have  no  subject  of  worldly 
pride  but  their  colour ;  and  the  philosophy  of  the 
clergy  and  other  professional  men  who  constituted  what 
in  some  countries  is  called  the  intellectual  class.  These 
influences  resulted  in  a  rare  uniformity  of  opinion  that 
slavery  was  right  and  all  attacks  on  it  were  monstrous, 
that  the  Southern  States  were  free  to  secede  and  form, 
if  they  chose,  a  new  Confederacy,  and  that  they  ought 
to  do  this  if  the  moment  should  arrive  when  they  could 
not  otherwise  safeguard  their  interests.  Doubtless 
there  were  leading  men  who  had  thought  over  the 
matter  in  advance  of  the  rest  and  taken  counsel  together 
long  before,  but  the  fact  seems  to  be  that  such  leaders 
now  found  their  followers  in  advance  of  them.  Jefferson 
Davis,  by  far  the  most  commanding  man  among  them, 


198  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

now  found  himself — certainly  it  served  him  right — 
anxiously  counselling  delay,  and  spending  nights  in 
prayer  before  he  made  his  farewell  speech  to  the  Senate 
in  words  of  greater  dignity  and  good  feeling  than  seem 
to  comport  with  the  fanatical  narrowness  of  his  view 
and  the  progressive  warping  of  his  determined  character 
to  which  it  condemned  him.  Whatever  fundamental 
loyalty  to  the  Union  existed  in  any  man's  heart  there 
were  months  of  debate  in  which  it  found  no  organised 
and  hardly  any  audible  expression.  The  most  notable 
stand  against  actual  secession  was  that  which  was  made 
in  Georgia  by  Stephens  ;  he  was  determined  and 
outspoken,  but  he  proceeded  wholly  upon  the  ground 
that  secession  was  premature.  And  this  instance  is 
significant  of  something  further.  It  has  been  said  that 
discussion  and  voting  were  not  free,  and  it  would  be 
altogether  unlikely  that  their  freedom  should  in  no 
cases  be  infringed,  but  there  is  no  evidence  that  this 
charge  was  widely  true.  It  is  surely  significant  of  the 
general  temper  of  the  South,  and  most  honourable  to  it, 
that  Stephens,  who  thus  struggled  against  secession  at 
that  moment,  was  chosen  Vice- President  of  the  Southern 
Confederacy. 

By  February  4,  1861,  the  States  of  Mississippi, 
Florida,  Alabama,  Georgia,  and  Louisiana  had  followed 
South  Carolina  by  passing  Ordinances  of  Secession,  and 
on  that  date  representatives  of  these  States  met  at 
Montgomery  in  Alabama  to  found  a  new  Confederacy. 
Texas,  where  considerable  resistance  was  offered  by 
Governor  Houston,  the  adventurous  leader  under  whom 
that  State  had  separated  from  Mexico,  was  in  process 
of  passing  the  like  Ordinance.  Virginia  and  North 
Carolina,  which  lie  north  of  the  region  where  cotton 
prevails,  and  with  them  their  western  neighbour 
Tennessee,  and  Arkansas,  yet  further  west  and  separated 
from  Tennessee  by  the  Mississippi  river,  did  not  secede 
till  after  Lincoln's  inauguration  and  the  outbreak  of  war. 
But  the  position  of  Virginia  (except  for  its  western 
districts)  admitted  of  very  little  doubt,  and  that  of 
Tennessee  and  North  Carolina  was  known  to  be  much 


SECESSION  199 

the  same.  Virginia  took  a  historic  pride  in  the  Union, 
and  its  interest  in  slavery  was  not  quite  the  same  as 
that  of  the  cotton  States,  yet  its  strongest  social  ties 
were  to  the  South.  This  State  was  now  engaged  in  a 
last  idle  attempt  to  keep  itself  and  other  border 
States  in  the  Union,  with  some  hope  also  that  the  de 
parted  States  might  return  ;  and  on  this  same  February  6, 
a  "  Peace  Convention,"  invited  by  Virginia  and  attended 
by  delegates  from  twenty-one  States,  met  at  Washington 
with  ex- President  Tyler  in  the  chair ;  but  for  Virginia 
it  was  all  along  a  condition  of  any  terms  of  agreement 
that  the  right  of  any  State  to  secede  should  be  fully 
acknowledged. 

The  Congress  of  the  seceding  States,  which  met  at 
Montgomery,  was  described  by  Stephens  as,  "  taken  all 
in  all,  the  noblest,  soberest,  most  intelligent,  and  most 
conservative  body  I  was  ever  in."  It  has  been  remarked 
that  Southern  politicians  of  the  agitator  type  were 
not  sent  to  it.  It  adopted  a  provisional  Constitution 
modelled  largely  upon  that  of  the  United  States. 
Jefferson  Davis,  who  had  retired  to  his  farm,  was  sent 
for  to  become  President ;  Stephens,  as  already  said, 
became  Vice-President.  The  delegates  there  were  to 
continue  in  session  for  the  present  as  the  regular  Congress. 
Whether  sobered  by  the  thought  that  they  were  acting 
in  the  eyes  of  the  world,  or  in  accordance  with  their  own 
prevailing  sentiment,  these  men,  some  of  whom  had 
before  urged  the  revival  of  the  slave  trade,  now  placed 
in  their  Constitution  a  perpetual  prohibition  of  it,  and 
when,  as  a  regular  legislature,  they  afterwards  passed  a 
penal  statute  which  carried  out  this  intention  in 
adequately,  President  Davis  conscientiously  vetoed  it 
and  demanded  a  more  satisfactory  measure.  At  his 
inauguration  the  Southern  President  delivered  an 
address,  typical  of  that  curious  blending  of  propriety 
and  insincerity,  of  which  the  politics  of  that  period  in 
America  had  offered  many  examples.  It  may  seem 
incredible,  but  it  contained  no  word  of  slavery,  but 
recited  in  dignified  terms  how  the  South  had  been 
driven  to  separation  by  "  wanton  aggression  on  the 


200  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

part  of  others,"  and  after  it  had  "  vainly  endeavoured 
to  secure  tranquillity."  The  new  Southern  Congress 
now  resolved  to  take  over  the  forts  and  other  property 
in  the  seceded  States  that  had  belonged  to  the  Union, 
and  the  first  Confederate  general,  Beauregard,  was  sent 
to  Charleston  to  hover  over  Fort  Sumter. 

3.  The  Inauguration  of  Lincoln. 

The  first  necessary  business  of  the  President-Elect,  | 
while  he  watched  the  gathering  of  what  Emerson  named 
"  the  hurricane  in  which  he  was  called  to  the  helm,"  was 
to  construct  a  strong  Cabinet,  to  which  may  be  added! 
the  seemingly  unnecessary  business  forced  upon  him  of 
dealing  with  a  horde  of  pilgrims  who  at  once  began 
visiting  him  to  solicit  some  office  or,  in  rarer  cases,  to 
press  their  disinterested  opinions.     His  Cabinet,  designed 
in  principle,  as  has  been  said,  while  he  was  waiting  in 
the  telegraph  office  for  election  returns,  was  actually 
constructed  with  some  delay  and  hesitation.     Lincoln 
could  not  know  personally  all  the  men  he  invited  to 
join  him,  but  he  proceeded  with  the  view  of  conjoining 
in  his  administration  representatives  of  the  chief  shades 
I  of  opinion  which  in  this  critical  time  it  would  be  his 
1  supreme   duty   to   hold   together.     Not    only   different 
shades  of  opinion,  but  the  local  sentiment  of  different 
districts  had  to  be  considered  ;  he  once  complained  that 
f\i  the  twelve  Apostles  had  to  be  chosen  nowadays  the 
(^  principle  of  locality  would  have  to  be  regarded  ;    but 
at  this  time  there  was  very  solid  reason  why  different 
States  should  be  contented  and  why  he  should  be  advised 
as    to    their    feelings.     His    own    chief    rivals    for    the 
Presidency  offered  a  good  choice  from  both  these  points 
of  view.     They  were  Seward  of  New  York,  Chase  of 
Ohio,    Bates    of   Missouri,    Cameron    of    Pennsylvania. 
Seward  and  Chase  were  both  able  and  outstanding  men  : 
the  former  was  in  a  sense  the  old  Republican  leader, 
but  was  more  and  more  coming  to  be  regarded  as  the 
typical  "  Conservative,"  or  cautious  Republican ;  Chase 
on  the  other  hand  was  a  leader  of  the  "  Radicals,"  who 
were  "  stern  and  unbending  "  in  their  attitude  towards 


SECESSION  201 

slavery  and  towards  the  South.  These  two  must  be 
got  and  kept  together  if  possible.  Bates  was  a  good  and 
capable  man  who  moreover  came  from  Missouri,  a 
border  slave  State,  where  his  influence  was  much  to  be 
desired.  He  became  Attorney-General.  Cameron,  an 
unfortunate  choice  as  it  turned  out,  was  a  very  wealthy 
business  man  ot  Pennsylvania,  representative  of  the 
weighty  Protectionist  influence  there.  After  he  had 
been  offered  office,  which  had  been  without  Lincoln's 
authority  promised  him  in  the  Republican  Convention, 
Lincoln  was  dismayed  by  representations  that  he  was 
"  a  bad,  corrupted  man  "  ;  he  wrote  a  curious  letter 
asking  Cameron  to  refuse  his  offer  ;  Cameron  instead 
produced  evidence  of  the  desire  of  Pennsylvania  for 
him  ;  Lincoln  stuck  to  his  offer  ;  the  old  Whig  element 
among  Republicans,  the  Protectionist  element,  and 
above  all,  the  friends  of  the  indispensable  Seward, 
would  otherwise  have  been  outweighted  in  the 
Cabinet.  Cameron  eventually  became  for  a  time 
Secretary  for  War.  To  these  Lincoln,  upon  some 
body's  strong  representations,  tried,  without  much 
hope,  to  add  some  distinctly  Southern  politician.  The 
effort,  of  course,  failed.  Ultimately  the  Cabinet  was 
completed  by  the  addition  of  Caleb  Smith  of  Indiana 
as  Secretary  of  the  Interior,  Gideon  Welles  of  Con 
necticut  as  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  and  Montgomery 
Blair  of  Maryland  as  Postmaster-General.  Welles, 
with  the  guidance  of  a  brilliant  subordinate,  Fox, 
served  usefully,  was  very  loyal  to  Lincoln,  had  an 
antipathy  to  England  which  was  dangerous,  and  lived 
to  write  immense  memoirs  which  are  oftener  quoted 
than  read.  Blair  was  a  vehement,  irresponsible  person 
with  an  influential  connection,  and,  which  was  impor 
tant,  his  influence  and  that  of  his  family  lay  in  Maryland 
and  other  border  slave  States.  Of  all  these  men, 
Seward,  Secretary  of  State — that  is,  Foreign  Minister 
and  something  more — and  Chase,  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury,  most  concern  us.  Lincoln's  offer  to  Seward 
was  made  and  accepted  in  terms  that  did  credit  to  both 
men,  and  Seward,  still  smarting  at  his  own  defeat,  was 


202  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

admirably  loyal.  But  his  friends,  though  they  had 
secured  the  appointment  of  Cameron  to  support  them, 
thought  increasingly  ill  of  the  prospects  of  a  Cabinet 
which  included  the  Radical  Chase.  On  the  very  night 
before  his  inauguration  Lincoln  received  from  Seward, 
who  had  just  been  helping  to  revise  his  Inaugural  Address, 
a  letter  withdrawing  his  acceptance  of  office.  By  some 
not  clearly  recorded  exercise  of  that  great  power  over 
men,  which,  if  with  some  failures,  was  generally  at  his 
command,  he  forced  Seward  to  see  that  the  uncon 
ditional  withdrawal  of  this  letter  was  his  public  duty. 
It  must  throughout  what  follows  be  remembered  that 
Lincoln's  first  and  most  constant  duty  was  to  hold 
together  the  jarring  elements  in  the  North  which  these 
jarring  elements  in  his  own  Cabinet  represented  ;  and 
it  was  one  of  his  great  achievements  that-  he  kept 
together,  for  as  long  as  was  needful,  able  but  discordant 
public  servants  who  could  never  have  combined  together 
without  him. 

On  February  n,  1861,  Lincoln,  standing  on  the 
gallery  at  the  end  of  a  railway  car,  upon  the  instant  of 
departure  from  the  home  to  which  he  never  returned, 
said  to  his  old  neighbours  (according  to  the  version  of 
his  speech  which  his  private  secretary  got  him  to  dictate 
immediately  after)  :  "  My  friends,  no  one,  not  in  my 
situation,  can  appreciate  my  feeling  of  sadness  at  this 
parting.  To  this  place,  and  the  kindness  of  these 
people,  I  owe  everything.  Here  I  have  lived  for  a 
quarter  of  a  century,  and  have  passed  from  a  young  to 
an  old  man.  Here  my  children  have  been  born  and 
one  is  buried.  I  now  leave,  not  knowing  when  or  whether 
ever  I  may  return,  with  a  task  before  me  greater  than 
that  which  rested  upon ,  Washington.  Without  the 
assistance  of  that  Divine  Being  who  ever  attended  him, 
I  cannot  succeed.  With  that  assistance,  I  cannot  fail. 
Trusting  in  Him  who  can  go  with  me,  and  remain  with 
you,  and  be  everywhere  for  good,  let  us  confidently 
hope  that  all  will  yet  be  well.  To  His  care  commending 
you,  as  I  hope  in  your  prayers  you  will  commend  me,  I 
bid  you  an  affectionate  farewell." 


SECESSION  203 

He  was,  indeed,  going  to  a  task  not  less  great  than 
Washington's,  but  he  was  going  to  it  with  a  preparation 
in  many  respects  far  inferior  to  his.  For  the  last  eight 
years  he  had  laboured  as  a  public  speaker,  and  in  a 
measure  as  a  party  leader,  and  had  displayed  and 
developed  compr_ei£ask>n,  perhaps  unequalled,  of  some 
^JLJnJ^rCfr  ranm-  whjcli  inould  public  atiEairsT  But, 
except  in  sheer  moral  discipline,  those  years  had  done 
nothing  to  sttpply  the  special  training  which  he  had 
previously  lacked,  for  high  executive  office.  In  such 
office  at  such  a  time  ready  decision  in  an  obscure  and 
passing  situation  may  often  be  a  not  less  requisite  than 
philosophic  grasp  either  of  the  popular  mind  or  of 
eternal  laws.  The  powers  which  he  had  hitherto 
shown  would  still  be  needful  to  him,  but  so  too  would 
other  powers  which  he  had  never  practised  in  any 
comparable  position,  and  which  nature  does  not  in  a 
moment  supply.  Any  attempt  to  judge  of  Lincoln's 
Presidency — and  it  can  only  be  judged  at  all  when  it 
has  gone  on  some  way — must  take  account,  not  perhaps 
so  much  of  his  inexperience,  as  of  his  own  reasonable 
consciousness  of  it  and  his  great  anxiety  to  use  the 
advice  of  men  who  were  in  any  way  presumably  more 
competent. 

He  deliberately  delayed  his  arrival  in  Washington  and 
availed  himself  of  official  invitations  to  stay  at  four 
great  towns  and  five  State  capitals  which  he  could 
conveniently  pass  on  his  way.  The  journey  abounded 
in  small  incidents  and  speeches,  some  of  which  exposed 
him  to  a  little  ridicule  in  the  press,  though  they  probably 
created  an  undercurrent  of  sympathy  for  him.  Near  one 
station  where  the  train  stopped  lived  a  little  girl  he  knew, 
who  had  recently  urged  upon  him  to  wear  a  beard  or 
whiskers.  To  this  dreadful  young  person,  and  to  that 
persistent  good  nature  of  his  which  was  now  and  then 
fatuous,  was  due  the  ill-designed  hairy  ornamentation 
which  during  his  Presidency  hid  the  really  beautiful 
modelling  of  his  jaw  and  chin.  He  enquired  for  her  at 
the  station,  had  her  fetched  from  the  crowd,  claimed  her 
praise  for  this  supposed  improvement,  and  kissed  her  in 


204  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

presence  of  the  press.  In  New  York  he  was  guilty  of  a 
more  sinister  and  tragic  misfeasance.  In  that  city,  where, 
if  it  may  be  said  with  respect,  there  has  existed  from  of 
old  a  fashionable  circle  not  convinced  of  its  own  gentility 
and  insisting  the  more  rigorously  on  minor  decorum, 
Lincoln  went  to  the  opera,  and  history  still  deplores 
that  this  misguided  man  went  there  and  sat  there  with 
his  large  hands  in  black  kid  gloves.  Here  perhaps  it  is 
well  to  say  that  the  educated  world  of  the  Eastern 
States,  including  those  who  privately  deplored  Lincoln's 
supposed  unfitness,  treated  its  untried  chief  magistrate 
with  that  engrained  good  breeding  to  which  it  was 
utterly  indifferent  how  plain  a  man  he  might  be.  His 
lesser  speeches  as  he  went  were  unstudied  appeals  to 
loyalty,  with  very  simple  avowals  of  inadequacy  to  his 
task,  and  expressions  of  reliance  on  the  people's  support 
when  he  tried  to  do  his  duty.  To  a  man  who  can  some 
times  speak  from  the  heart  and  to  the  heart  as  Lincoln 
did  it  is  perhaps  not  given  to  be  uniformly  felicitous. 
Among  these  speeches  was  that  delivered  at  Philadelphia, 
which  has  already  been  quoted,  but  most  of  them  were 
not  considered  felicitous  at  the  time.  They  were  too 
unpretentious.  Moreover,  they  contained  sentences 
which  seemed  to  understate  the  gravity  of  the  crisis  in  a 
way  which  threw  doubt  on  his  own  serious  statesmanship. 
Whether  they  were  felicitous  or  not,  the  intention  of 
these  much-criticised  utterances  was  the  best  proof 
of  his  statesmanship.  He  would  appeal  to  the  steady 
loyalty  of  the  North,  but  he  was  not  going  to  arouse  its 
passion.  He  assumed  to  the  last  that  calm  reflection 
might  prevail  in  the  South,  which  was  menaced  by 
nothing  but  "  an  artificial  crisis."  He  referred  to  war 
as  a  possibility,  but  left  no  doubt  of  his  own  wish  by 
all  means  to  avoid  it.  "  There  will,"  he  said,  "  be  no 
bloodshed  unless  it  be  forced  on  the  Government.  The 
Government  will  not  use  force  unless  force  is  used 
against  it." 

Before  he  passed  through  Baltimore  he  received 
earnest  communications  from  Seward  and  from  General 
Scott.  Each  had  received  trustworthy  information  of 


SECESSION  205 

a  plot,  which  existed,  to  murder  him  on  his  way  through, 
and  begged  him  to  avoid  Baltimore.  He  accordingly 
had  his  car  sent  round  Baltimore  and  reached  Washing 
ton  unexpected  on  February  2.  This  was  his  obvious 
duty,  and  nobody  who  knew  him  was  ever  in  doubt  of 
his  personal  intrepidity  ;  but  of  course  it  helped  to 
damp  the  effect  of  what  many  people  would  have  been 
glad  to  regard  as  a  triumphal  progress. 

On  March  4,  1861,  old  Buchanan  came  in  his  carriage 
to  escort  his  successor  to  the  inaugural  ceremony,  where 
it  was  the  ironical  fate  of  Chief  Justice  Taney  to 
administer  the  oath  to  a  President  who  had  already 
gone  far  to  undo  his  great  work.  Yet  a  third  notable 
Democrat  was  there  to  do  a  pleasant  little  act.  Douglas, 
Lincoln's  defeated  rival,  placed  himself  with  a  fine 
ostentation  by  his  side,  and,  observing  that  he  was 
embarrassed  as  to  where  to  put  his  new  tall  hat  and 
preposterous  gold-knobbed  cane,  took  charge  of  these 
encumbrances  before  the  moment  arrived  for  the  most 
eagerly  awaited  of  all  his  speeches.  Lincoln  had 
submitted  his  draft  of  his  "  First  Inaugural  "  to  Seward, 
and  this  draft  with  Seward's  abundant  suggestions  of 
amendment  has  been  preserved.  It  has  considerable 
literary  interest,  and,  by  the  readiness  with  which  most 
of  Seward's  suggestions  were  adopted,  and  the  decision 
with  which  some,  and  those  not  the  least  important, 
were  set  aside  by  Lincoln,  it  illustrates  well  the  working 
relation  which,  after  one  short  struggle,  was  to  be 
established  between  these  two  men.  By  Seward's 
advice  Lincoln  added  to  an  otherwise  dry  speech  some 
concluding  paragraphs  of  emotional  appeal.  The  last 
sentence  of  the  speech,  which  alone  is  much  remembered, 
is  Seward's  in  the  first  conception  of  it,  Seward's  in  the 
slightly  hackneyed  phrase  with  which  it  ends,  Lincoln's 
alone  in  the  touch  of  haunting  beauty  which  is  on  it. 

His  "First  Inaugural"  was  by  general  confession  an  | 
able  state  paper,  setting  forth  simply  and  well  a  situa- 
tion  with  which  we  are  now  familiar.     It  sets  out  dis- 
passionately  the   state   of  the  controversy  on  slavery, 
lays  down  with  brief  argument  the  position  that  the 


O 


206  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Union  is  indissoluble,  and  proceeds  to  define  the  duty 

/  of  the  Government  in  face  of  an  attempt  to  dissolve  it. 

"  The  power,"  he  said,  "  confided  to  me  will  be  used  to 

hold,    occupy,    and    possess    the    property   and   places 

belonging  to  the  Government,  and  to  collect  the  duties 

on  imports  ;    but   beyond   what  may  be  necessary  for 

these  objects  there  will  be  no  invasion,  no   using  of 

force  against  or  among  the  people  anywhere.     The  mails, 

unless   repelled,   will  continue   to   be   furnished   in   all 

parts  of  the  Union."     He  proceeded  to  set  out  what  he 

conceived  to  be  the  impossibility  of  real  separation  ; 

the  intimate  relations  between  the  peoples  of  the  several 

States  must  still  continue  ;   they  would  still  remain  for 

\  adjustment  after  any  length  of  warfare  ;   they  could  be 

,/far    better   adjusted    in    Union    than    in    enmity.     He 

concluded  :    "  In  your  hands,   my  dissatisfied  fellow- 

I  countrymen,  and  not  in  mine,  is  the  momentous  issue 

\lof  civil  war.     The  Government   will   not   assail   you. 

I  You  can  have  no  conflict  without  being  yourselves  the 

/  aggressors.     I  am  loath  to  close.     We  are  not  enemies 

but  friends.     We  must  not  be  enemies.     Though  passion 

I  may  have  strained,  it  must  not  break  our  bonds  of 

affection.     The   mystic   chords   of  memory,   stretching 

o    from  every  battlefield  and  patriot  grave  to  every  living 

heart  and  hearthstone  all  over  this  broad  land,  will  yet 

\  swell  the   chorus   of  Union,   when   again   touched,   as 

|  surely  they  will  be,  by  the  better  angels  of  our  nature." 

4.  The  Outbreak  of  War. 

Upon  the  newly-inaugurated  President  there  now 
descended  a  swarm  of  office-seekers .  The  Republican 
party  had  never  been  in  power  before,  and  these  patriotic 
people  exceeded  in  number  and  voracity  those  that 
had  assailed  any  American  President  before.  To  be 
accessible  to  all  such  was  the  normal  duty  of  a  President ; 
it  was  perhaps  additionally  incumbent  on  him  at  this 
time.  When  in  the  course  of  nature  the  number  of 
office-seekers  abated,  they  were  succeeded,  as  will  be 
seen,  by  supplicants  of  another  kind,  whose  petitions 
were  often  really  harrowing.  The  horror  of  this  en- 


SECESSION  207 

during  visitation  has  been  described  by  Artemus  Ward 
in  terms  which  Lincoln  himself  could  not  have  improved 
upon.  His  classical  treatment  of  the  subject  is  worth 
serious  reference  ;  for  it  should  be  realised  that  Lincoln, 
who  had  both  to  learn  his  new  trade  of  statecraft  and 
to  f  xercise  it  in  a  terrible  emergency,  did  so  with  a 
large  part  of  each  day  necessarily  consumed  by  worrying 
and  distasteful  tasks  of  a  much  paltrier  kind. 

On  the  day  after  the  Inauguration  came  word  from 
Major  Anderson  at  Fort  Sumter  that  he  could  only 
hold  out  a  few  weeks  longer  unless  reinforced  and 
provisioned.  With  it  came  to  Lincoln  the  opinion  of 
General  Scott,  that  to  relieve  Fort  Sumter  now  would 
require  a  force  of  20,000  men,  which  did  not  exist.  The 
Cabinet  was  summoned  with  military  and  naval  advisers. 
The  sailors  thought  they  could  throw  men  and  provisions 
into  Fort  Sumter  ;  the  soldiers  said  the  ships  would  be 
destroyed  by  the  Confederate  batteries.  Lincoln  asked 
his  Cabinet  whether,  assuming  it  to  be  feasible,  it  was 
politically  advisable  now  to  provision  Fort  Sumter. 
Blair  said  yes  emphatically  ;  Chase  said  yes  in  a  qualified 
way.  The  other  five  members  of  the  Cabinet  said  no ; 
General  Scott  had  given  his  opinion,  as  on  a  military 
question,  that  the  fort  should  now  be  evacuated ;  they 
argued  that  the  evacuation  of  this  one  fort  would  be 
recognised  by  the  country  as  merely  a  military  necessity 
arising  from  the  neglect  of  the  last  administration. 
Lincoln  reserved  his  decision. 

Let  us'conceive  the  effect  of  a  decision  to  evacuate  Fort 
Sumter.  South  Carolina  had  for  long  claimed  it  as  a 
due  acknowledgment  of  its  sovereign  and  independent 
rights,  and  for  no  other  end  ;  the  Confederacy  now 
claimed  it  and  its  first  act  had  been  to  send  Beauregard 
to  threaten  the  fort.  Even  Buchanan  had  ended  by 
withstanding  these  claims.  The  assertion  that  he  would 
hold  these  forts  had  been  the  gist  of  Lincoln's  Inaugural. 
This  was  the  one  fort  that  was  in  the  eyes  of  the  Northern 
public  or  the  Southern  public  either  ;  they  probably 
never  realised  that  there  were  other  forts,  Fort  Pickens, 
for  example,  on  the  Gulf  of  Mexico,  which  the  ad- 


208  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

ministration  was  prepared  to  defend.  And  now  it  was 
proposed  that  Lincoln,  who  had  put  down  his  foot  with 
a  bang  yesterday,  should  take  it  up  with  a  shuffle  to-day. 
And  Lincoln  reserved  his  judgment  ;  and,  which  is 
much  more,  went  on  reserving  it  till  the  question  nearly 
settled  itself  to  his  disgrace. 

Lincoln  lacked  here,  it  would  seem,  not  by  any  means 
the  qualities  of  the  trained  administrator,  but  just  that 
|  rough  perception  and  vigour  which  untaught  genius 
\  might  be  supposed  to  possess.  The  passionate  Jackson 
(who,  by  the  way,  was  a  far  more  educated  man  in  the 
respects  which  count)  would  not  have  acted  so.  Lincoln, 
it  is  true,  had  declared  that  he  would  take  no  provocative 
step — "  In  your  hands,  my  dissatisfied  fellow-country 
men,  and  not  in  mine,  is  the  momentous  issue  of  civil 
war,"  and  the  risk  which  he  would  have  taken  by 
overruling  that  day  the  opinion  of  the  bulk  of  his  Cabinet 
based  on  that  of  his  chief  military  adviser  is  obvious, 
but  it  seems  to  have  been  a  lesser  risk  than  he  did  take 
{n  delaying  so  long  to  overrule  his  Cabinet.  It  is\ 
precisely  characteristic  of  his  strength  and  of  his  weak 
ness  that  he  did  not  at  once  yield  to  his  advisers ;  that 
he  long  continued  weighing  the  matter  undisturbed  by 
the  danger  of  delay ;  that  he  decided  as  soon  as  and  nol 
sooner  than  he  felt  sure  as  to  the  political  results,  whicli 
alone  here  mattered,  for  the  military  consequencesi 
amounted  to  nothing. 

This  story  was  entangled  from  the  first  with  another 
difficult  story.  Commissioners  from  the  Southern 
Confederacy  came  to  Washington  and  sought  interviews 
with  Seward  ;  they  came  to  treat  for  the  recognition  of 
the  Confederacy  and  the  peaceful  surrender  of  forts  and 
the  like  within  its  borders.  Meanwhile  the  action  of 
Virginia  was  in  the  balance,  and  the  "  Peace  Con 
vention,"  summoned  by  Virginia,  still  "  threshing 
again,"  as  Lowell  said,  "  the  already  twice-threshed 
straw  of  debate."  The  action  of  Virginia  and  of  other 
border  States,  about  which  Lincoln  was  intensely 
solicitous,  would  certainly  depend  upon  the  action  of  the 
Government  towards  the  States  that  had  already  seceded. 


SECESSION 


209 


Might  it  not  be  well  that  the  Government  should  avoid 
immediate  conflict  with  South  Carolina  about  Fort 
Sumter,  though  conflict  with  the  Confederacy  about 
Fort  Pickens  and  the  rest  would  still  impend  ?  Was  it 
not  possible  that  conflict  could  be  staved  off  till  an 
agreement  could  be  reached  with  Virginia  and  the 
border  States,  which  would  induce  the  seceded  States  to 
return  ?  These  questions  were  clearly  absurd,  but  they 
were  as  clearly  natural,  and  they  greatly  exercised 
Seward.  Disappointed  at  not  being  President  and 
equally  disturbed  at  the  prospect  of  civil  war,  but  still 
inclined  to  large  and  sanguine  hopes,  he  was  rather 
anxious  to  take  things  out  of  Lincoln's  hands  and  very 
anxious  to  serve  his  country  as  the  great  peacemaker. 
Indirect  negotiations  now  took  place  between  him  and 
the  Southern  Commissioners,  who  of  course  could  not. 
be  officially  recognised,  through  the  medium  of  two 
Supreme  Court  Judges,  especially  one  Campbell,  who 
was  then  in  Washington.  Seward  was  quite  loyal  to 
Lincoln  and  told  him  in  a  general  way  what  he  was 
doing  ;  he  was  also  candid  with  Campbell  and  his 
friends,  and  explained  to  them  his  lack  of  authority, 
but  he  talked  freely  and  rashly  of  what  he  hoped  to  bring 
about.  Lincoln  gave  Seward  some  proper  cautions  and 
left  him  all  proper  freedom  ;  but  it  is  possible  that  he 
once  told  Douglas  that  he  intended,  at  that  moment, 
to  evacuate  Fort  Sumter.  The  upshot  of  the  matter  is 
that  the  decision  of  the  Government  was  delayed  by 
negotiations  which,  as  it  ought  to  have  known,  could 
come  to  nothing,  and  that  the  Southern  Government 
and  the  Commissioners,  after  they  had  got  home, 
thought  they  had  been  deceived  in  these  negotiations. 

Discussions  were  still  proceeding  as  to  Fort  Sumter 
when  a  fresh  difficulty  arose  for  Lincoln,  but  one  which 
enabled  him  to  become  henceforth  master  in  his 
Cabinet.  The  strain  of  Seward's  position  upon  a  man 
inclined  to  be  vain  and  weak  can  easily  be  imagined, 
but  the  sudden  vagary  in  which  it  now  resulted  was 
surprising.  Upon  April  I  he  sent  to  Lincoln  "  Some 
Thoughts  for  the  President's  Consideration."  In  this 


210  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

paper,  after  deploring  what  he  described  as  the  lack  of 
any  policy  so  far,  and  defining,  in  a  way  that  does  not 
matter,  his  attitude  as  to  the  forts  in  the  South,  he 
proceeded  thus  :  "  I  would  demand  explanations  from 
Great  Britain  and  Russia,  and  send  agents  into  Canada, 
Mexico,  and  Central  America,  to  raise  a  vigorous  spirit 
of  independence  on  this  continent  against  European 
intervention,  and,  if  satisfactory  explanations  are  not 
received  from  Spain  and  France,  would  convene  Congress 
and  declare  war  against  them."  In  other  words, 
Seward  would  seek  to  end  all  domestic  dissensions  by 
suddenly  creating  out  of  nothing  a  dazzling  foreign 
policy.  But  this  was  not  the  only  point,  even  if  it  was 
the  main  point ;  he  proceeded  :  "  Either  the  President 
must  do  it  "  (that  is  the  sole  conduct  of  this  policy) 
"  himself,  or  devolve  it  on  some  member  of  his  Cabinet. 
It  is  not  my  especial  province.  But  I  neither  seek  to 
evade  nor  assume  responsibility."  In  other  words, 
Seward  put  himself  forward  as  the  sole  director  of  the 
Government.  In  his  brief  reply  Lincoln  made  no  refer 
ence  whatever  to  Seward's  amazing  programme.  He 
pointed  out  that  the  policy  so  far,  as  to  which  Seward 
had  complained,  was  one  in  which  Seward  had  entirely 
concurred.  As  to  the  concluding  demand  that  some 
one  man,  and  that  man  Seward,  should  control  all 
policy,  he  wrote,  "  If  this  must  be  done,  I  must  do  it. 
When  a  general  line  of  policy  is  adopted,  I  apprehend 
there  is  no  danger  of  its  being  changed  without  good 
reason,  or  continuing  to  be  a  subject  of  unnecessary 
debate  ;  still,  upon  points  arising  in  its  progress  I  wish, 
and  suppose  I  am  entitled  to  have,  the  advice  of  all 
the  Cabinet."  Seward  was  not  a  fool,  far  from  it ;  he 
was  one  of  the  ablest  men  in  America,  only  at  that 
moment  strained  and  excited  beyond  the  limits  of  his 
good  sense.  Lincoln's  quiet  answer  sobered  him  then 
and  for  ever  after.  He  showed  a  generous  mind  ;  he 
wrote  to  his  wife  soon  after  :  "  Executive  force  and 
vigour  are  rare  qualities  ;  the  President  is  the  best  of 
us."  And  Lincoln's  generosity  was  no  less  ;  his  private 
secretary,  Nicolay,  saw  these  papers  ;  but  no  other 


SECESSION  211 

man  knew  anything  of  Seward's  abortive  rebellion 
against  Lincoln  till  after  they  both  were  dead.  The 
story  needs  no  explanation,  but  the  more  attentively  all 
the  circumstances  are  considered,  the  more  Lincoln's 
handling  of  this  emergency,  which  threatened  the  ruin 
of  his  Government,  throws  into  shade  the  weakness  he 
had  hitherto  shown. 

Lincoln  was  thus  in  a  stronger  position  when  he  finally 
decided  as  to  Fort  Sumter.  It  is  unnecessary  to  follow 
the  repeated  consultations  that  took  place.  There  were 
preparations  for  possible  expeditions  both  to  Fort 
Sumter  and  to  Fort  Pickens,  and  various  blunders 
about  them,  and  Seward  made  some  trouble  by  officious 
interference  about  them.  An  announcement  was  sent 
to  the  Governor  of  South  'Carolina  that  provisions  would 
be  sent  to  Fort  Sumter  and  he  was  assured  that  if  this 
was  unopposed  no  further  steps  would  be  taken.  What 
chiefly  concerns  us  is  that  the  eventual  decision  to 
send  provisions  but  not  troops  to  Fort  Sumter  was 
Lincoln's  decision  ;  but  that  it  was  not  taken  till  after 
Senators  and  Congressmen  had  made  clear  to  him  that 
Northern  opinion  would  support  him.  It  was  the  right 
decision,  for  it  conspicuously  avoided  the  appearance  of 
provocation,  while  it  upheld  the  right  of  the  Union  ;  but 
it  was  taken  perilously  late,  and  the  delay  exposed  the 
Government  to  the  risk  of  a  great  humiliation. 

An  Alabama  gentleman  had  urged  Jefferson  Davis  that 
the  impending  struggle  must  not  be  delayed.  "  Unless," 
he  said,  "  you  sprinkle  blood  in  the  face  of  the  people 
of  Alabama,  they  will  be  back  in  the  old  Union  in  ten 
days."  There  is  every  reason  to  suppose  that  the 
gentleman's  statement  as  to  the  probable  collapse  of 
the  South  was  mere  rhetoric,  but  it  seems  that  his  advice 
led  to  orders  being  sent  to  Beauregard  to  reduce  Fort 
Sumter.  Beauregard  sent  a  summons  to  Anderson ; 
Anderson,  now  all  but  starved  out,  replied  that  unless  he 
received  supplies  or  instructions  he  would  surrender  on 
April  15.  Whether  by  Beauregard's  orders  or  through 
some  misunderstanding,  the  Confederate  batteries  opened 
fire  on  Fort  Sumter  on  April  12.  Fort  Sumter  became 


212  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

untenable  on  the  next  day,  when  the  relief  ships,  which 
Anderson  had  been  led  to  expect  sooner,  but  which 
could  in  no  case  really  have  helped  him,  were  just 
appearing  in  the  offing.  Anderson  very  properly 
capitulated.  On  Sunday,  April  14,  1861,  he  marched 
out  with  the  honours  of  war.  The  Union  flag  had  been 
fired  upon  in  earnest  by  the  Confederates,  and,  leaving 
Virginia  and  the  States  that  went  with  it  to  join  the 
Confederacy  if  they  chose,  the  North  sprang  to  arms. 

In  the  events  which  had  led  up  to  the  outbreak  of 
war  Abraham  Lincoln  had  played  a  part  more  admirable 
and  more  decisive  in  its  effect  than  his  countrymen 
could  have  noted  at  the  time  or  perhaps  have  appre 
ciated  since.  He  was  confronted  now  with  duties 
requiring  mental  gifts  of  a  different  kind  from  those 
which  he  had  hitherto  displayed,  and  with  temptations 
to  which  he  had  not  yet  been  exposed.  In  a  general 
sense  the  greatness  of  mind  and  heart  which  he  unfolded 
under  fierce  trial  do  not  need  to  be  demonstrated 
to-day.  Yet  in  detail  hardly  an  action  of  his  Presi 
dency  is  exempt  from  controversy  ;  nor  is  his  many- 
sided  character  one  of  those  which  men  readily  flatter 
themselves  that  they  understand.  There  are  always 
moreover  those  to  whom  it  is  a  marvel  how  any  great 
man  came  by  his  name.  The  particular  tribute,  which 
in  the  pages  that  follow  it  is  desired  to  pay  to  him, 
consists  in  the  careful  examination  of  just  those  actions 
and  just  those  qualities  of  his  upon  which  candid 
detraction  has  in  fact  fastened,  or  on  which  candid 
admiration  has  pronounced  with  hesitancy. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE    CONDITIONS    OF   THE    WAR 

IN  recounting  the  history  of  Lincoln's  Presidency,  it 
will  be  necessary  to  mark  the  course  of  the  Civil  War 
stage  by  stage  as  we  proceed.  There  are,  however,  one 
or  two  general  features  of  the  contest  with  which  it 
may  be  well  to  deal  by  way  of  preface. 

It  has  seldom  happened  that  a  people  entering  upon 
a  great  war  have  understood  at  the  outset  what  the 
character  of  that  war  would  be.  When  the  American 
Civil  War  broke  out  the  North  expected  an  easy  victory, 
but,  as  disappointment  came  soon  and  was  long  main 
tained,  many  clever  people  adopted  the  opinion,  which 
early  prevailed  in  Europe,  that  there  was  no  possibility 
of  their  success  at  all.  At  the  first  the  difficulty  of  the 
task  was  unrecognised  ;  under  early  and  long-sustained 
disappointment  the  strength  by  which  those  difficulties 
could  be  overcome  began  to  be  despaired  of  without 
reason. 

The  North,  after  several  slave  States,  which  were  at 
first  doubtful,  had  adhered  to  it,  had  more  than  double 
the  population  of  the  South  ;  of  the  Southern  population 
a  very  large  part  were  slaves,  who,  though  industrially  ' 
useful,  could  not  be  enlisted.     In  material  resources  the* 
superiority  of  the  North  was  no  less  marked,  and  itsi 
^material  wealth  grew  H^n'np^  ^ VIP  war  tnJ^PTpatpr  extent 
than  had  perhaps  everhappenecl  to  any  other  belligerent 
power.     These  advantages  were  likely  to  be  decisive  in 
the  end,  if  the  North  could  and  would  endure  to  the 
end.     But    at    the    very    beginning    these    advantages 
simply  did  not  tell  at  all,  for  the  immediately  aval] able 
military  force  of  the  North  was  insignificant,  and  that 
of  the  South  clearly  superior  to  it ;   and  even  when  they 
began  to  tell,  it  was  bound  to  be  very  long  before  theii 


2i4  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

full  weight  could  be  brought  to  bear.  And  the  object 
which  was  to  be  obtained  was  supremely  difficult  of 
attainment.  It  was  not  a  defeat  of  the  South  which 
might  result  in  the  alteration  of  a  frontier,  the  cession  of 
some  Colonies,  the  payment  of  an  indemnity,  and  such 
like  matters  ;  it  was  a  conquest  of  the  South  so  complete 
that  the  Union  could  be  restored  on  a  firmer  basis  than 
before.  Any  less  result  than  this  would  be  failure  in 
the  war.  And  the  country,  to  be  thus  completely 
conquered  by  an  unmilitary  people  of  nineteen  millions, 
was  of  enormous  extent :  leaving  out  of  account  the 
huge  outlying  State  of  Texas,  which  is  larger  than 
Germany,  the  remaining  Southern  States  which  joined 
in  the  Confederacy  have  an  area  somewhat  larger  than 
that  of  Germany,  Austria-Hungary,  Holland,  and  Bel 
gium  put  together ;  and  this  great  region  had  no  in 
dustrial  centres  or  other  points  of  such  great  strategic 
importance  that  by  the  occupation  of  them  the  remain 
ing  area  could  be  dominated.  The  feat  which  the 
Northern  people  eventually  achieved  has  been  said  by 
the  English  historians  of  the  war  (perhaps  with  some 
exaggeration)  to  have  been  "  a  greater  one  than  that 
which  Napoleon  attempted  to  his  own  undoing  when  he 
invaded  Russia  in  1812." 

On  the  other  hand,  the  South  was  in  some  respects 
very  favourably  placed  for  resisting  invasion  from  the 
North.  The  Southern  forces  during  most  of  the  war, 
were,  in  the  language  of  military  writers,  operating  on 
interior  lines  ;  that  is,  the  different  portions  of  them 
lay  nearer  to  one  another  than  did  the  different  portions 
of  the  Northern  forces,  and  could  be  more  quick'y 
brought  to  converge  on  the  same  point ;  the  country 
abounded  in  strong  positions  for  defence  which  could  be 
held  by  a  relatively  small  force,  while  in  every  invading 
movement  the  invaders  had  to  advance  long  distances 
from  the  base,  thus  exposing  their  lines  of  communication 
to  attack.  The  advantage  of  th  s  situation,  if  com 
petent  use  were  made  of  it,  was  bound  to  go  very  far 
towards  compensating  for  inferiority  of  numbers  ;  the 
North  could  not  make  its  superior  numbers  on  land  tell 


THE  CONDITIONS  OF  THE  WAR        215 

in  any  rapidly  decisive  fashion  without  exposing  itself 
to  dangerous  counter-strokes.  In  naval  strength  its 
superiority  was  asserted  almost  from  the  first,  and  by 
cutting  off  foreign  supplies  caused  the  Southern  armies 
to  suffer  severe  privations  before  the  war  was  half 
through ;  but  its  full  eifect  could  only  be  produced  very 
slowly.  Thus,  if  its  people  were  brave  and  its  leaders 
capable,  the  South  was  by  no  means  in  so  hopeless  a 
case  as  might  at  first  have  appeared  ;  with  good  fortune 
it  might  hope  to  strike  its  powerful  antagonist  some 
deadly  blow  before  that  antagonist  could  bring  its 
strength  to  bear ;  and  even  if  this  hope  failed,  a 
sufficiently  tenacious  defence  might  well  wear  down 
the  patience  of  the  North. 

As  soldiers  the  Southerners  started  with  a  superiority 
which  the  Northerners  could  only  overtake  slowly. 
If  each  people  were  taken  in  the  mass,  the  proportion 
of  Southerners  bred  to  an  outdoor  life  was  higher. 
Generally  speaking,  if  not  exactly  more  frugal,  they 
were  far  less  used  to  living  comfortably.  Above  all, 
all  classes  of  people  among  them  were  still  accustomed 
to  think  of  fighting  as  a  normal  and  suitable  occupation 
for  a  man ;  while  the  prevailing  temper  of  the  North 
thought  of  man  as  meant  for  business,  and  its  higher 
temper  was  apt  to  think  of  fighting  as  odious  and  war 
out  of  date.  This,  like  the  other  advantages  of  the 
South,  was  transitory  ;  before  very  long  Northerners 
who  became  soldiers  at  a  sacrifice  of  inclination,  from 
the  highest  spirit  of  patriotism  or  in  the  methodic 
temper  in  which  business  has  to  be  done,  would  become 
man  for  man  as  good  soldiers  as  the  Southerners ;  but  the 
original  superiority  of  the  Southerners  would  continue 
to  have  a  moral  effect  in  their  own  ranks  and  on  the  mind 
of  the  enemy,  more  especially  of  the  enemy's  generals, 
even  after  its  cause  had  ceased  to  exist ;  and  herein 
the  military  advantage  of  the  South  was  undoubtedly, 
through  the  first  half  of  the  war,  considerable. 

In  the  matter  of  leadership  the  South  had  certain 
very  real  and  certain  other  apparent  but  probably 
delusive  advantages.  The  United  States  had  no  large 


216  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

number  of  trained  military  officers,  still  capable  of 
active  service.  The  armies  of  the  North  and  South 
alike  had  to  be  commanded  and  staffed  to  a  great  extent 
by  men  who  first  studied  their  profession  in  that  war ; 
and  the  lack  of  ripe  military  judgment  was  likely  to  be 
felt  most  in  the  higher  commands  where  the  forces  to 
be  employed  and  co-ordinated  were  largest.  The  South 
secured  what  may  be  called  its  fair  proportion  of  the 
comparatively  few  officers,  but  it  was  of  tremendous 
moment  that,  among  the  officers  who,  when  the  war  began, 
were  recognised  as  competent,  two,  who  sadly  but  in 
simple  loyalty  to  the  State  of  Virginia  took  the  Southern 
side,  were  men  of  genius.  The  advantages  of  the  South 
would  have  been  no  advantages  without  skill  and 
resolution  to  make  use  of  them.  The  main  conditions 
of  the  war — the  vast  space,  the  difficulty  in  all  parts  of 
it  of  moving  troops,  the  generally  low  level  of  military 
knowledge — were  all  such  as  greatly  enhance  the  oppor 
tunities  of  the  most  gifted  commander.  Lee  and 
"  Stonewall  "  Jackson  thus  became,  the  former  through 
out  the  war,  the  latter  till  he  was  killed  in  the  summer 
of  1863,  factors  of  primary  importance  in  the  struggle. 
Wolseley,  who  had,  besides  studying  their  record, 
conversed  both  with  Lee  and  with  Moltke,  thought 
Lee  even  greater  than  Moltke,  and  the  military  writers 
of  our  day  speak  of  him  as  one  of  the  great  commanders 
of  history.  As  to  Jackson,  Lee's  belief  in  him  is 
sufficient  testimony  to  his  value.  And  the  good  fortune 
of  the  South  was  not  confined  to  these  two  signal 
instances.  Most  of  the  Southern  generals  who  appeared 
early  in  the  war  could  be  retained  in  important  com 
mands  to  the  end. 

The  South  might  have  seemed  at  first  equally  fortunate 
in  the  character  of  the  Administration  at  the  back  of 
the  generals.  An  ascendency  was  at  once  conceded  to 
Jefferson  Davis,  a  tried  political  leader,  to  which  Lincoln 
had  to  win  his  way,  and  the  past  experiences  of  the  two 
men  had  been  very  different.  The  operations  of  war 
in  which  Lincoln  had  taken  part  were  confined,  according 
to  his  own  romantic  account  in  a  speech  in  Congress, 


THE  CONDITIONS  OF  THE  WAR        217 

to  stealing  ducks  and  onions  from  the  civil  population  ; 
his  Ministers  were  as  ignorant  in  the  matter  as  he  ; 
their  military  adviser,  Scott,  was  so  infirm  that  he  had 
soon  to  retire,  and  it  proved  most  difficult  to  replace 
him.  Jefferson  Davis,  on  the  other  hand,  started  with 
knowledge  of  affairs,  including  military  affairs  ;  he  had 
been  Secretary  of  War  in  Pierce's  Cabinet  and  Chairman 
of  the  Senate  Committee  on  War  since  then  ;  above  all, 
he  had  been  a  soldier  and  had  commanded  a  regiment 
with  some  distinction  in  the  Mexican  War.  It  is  thought 
that  he  would  have  preferred  a  military  command  to  the 
Presidency  of  the  Confederacy,  and  as  his  own  experience 
of  actual  war  was  as  great  as  that  of  his  generals,  he 
can  hardly  be  blamed  for  a  disposition  to  interfere  with 
them  at  the  beginning.  But  military  historians,  while 
criticising  (perhaps  a  little  hastily)  all  Lincoln's  inter 
ventions  in  the  affairs  of  war  up  to  the  time  when  he 
found  generals  whom  he  trusted,  insist  that  Davis' 
systematic  interference  was  far  more  harmful  to  his  cause ; 
and  Wolseley,  who  watched  events  closely  from  Canada 
and  who  visited  the  Southern  Army  in  1863,  is  most 
emphatic  in  this  opinion.  He  interfered  with  Lee  to 
an  extent  which  nothing  but  Lee's  devoted  friendship 
and  loyalty  could  have  made  tolerable.  He  put  himself 
into  relations  of  dire  hostility  with  Joseph  Johnston, 
and  in  1864  suspended  him  in  the  most  injudicious 
manner.  Above  all,  when  the  military  position  of  the 
South  had  begun  to  be  acutely  perilous,  Jefferson  Davis 
neither  devised  for  himself,  nor  allowed  his  generals  to 
devise,  any  bold  policy  by  which  the  chance  that  still 
remained  could  be  utilised.  His  energy  of  will  showed 
itself  in  the  end  in  nothing  but  a  resolution  to  protract 
bloodshed  after  it  had  certainly  become  idle. 

If  we  turn  to  the  political  conditions,  on  which,  in 
any  but  a  short  war,  so  much  depends,  the  South  will 
appear  to  have  had  great  advantages.  Its  people  were 
more  richly  endowed  than  the  mixed  and  crudely 
democratic  multitude  of  the  North,  in  the  traditional 
aptitude  for  commanding  or  obeying  which  enables 
people  to  pull  together  in  a  crisis.  And  they  were 


2i 8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

united  in  a  cause  such  as  would  secure  the  sustained 
loyalty  of  any  ordinary  people  under  any  ordinary 
leader.  For,  though  it  was  nothing  but  slavery  that 
led  to  their  assertion  of  independence,  from  the  moment 
that  they  found  themselves  involved  in  war,  they  were 
fighting  for  a  freedom  to  which  they  felt  themselves 
entitled,  and  for  nothing  else  whatever.  A  few  success 
ful  encounters  at  the  start  tempted  the  ordinary 
Southerner  to  think  himself  a  better  man  than  the 
ordinary  Northerner,  even  as  the  Southern  Congressmen 
felt  themselves  superior  to  the  persons  whom  the 
mistaken  democracy  of  the  North  too  frequently  elected. 
This  claim  of  independence  soon  acquired  something  of 
the  fierce  pride  that  might  have  been  felt  by  an  ancient 
nation.  But  it  would  have  been  impossible  that  the 
Northern  people  as  a  whole  should  be  similarly  possessed 
by  the  cause  in  which  they  fought.  They  did  not 
seem  to  be  fighting  for  their  own  liberty,  and  they 
would  have  hated  to  think  that  they  were  fighting  for 
conquest.  They  were  fighting  for  the  maintenance  of 
a  national  unity  which  they  held  dear.  The  question"; 
f"ribw  far  it  was  worth  fighting  a  formidable  enemy  for  \ 
I  the  sake  of  eventual  unity  with  him,  was  bound  to_ 
\present  itself.  Thus,  far  from  wondering  that  the  cause 
of  the  Union  aroused  no  fuller  devotion  than  it  did  in 
the  whole  lump  of  the  Northern  people,  we  may  wonder 
that  it  inspired  with  so  lofty  a  patriotism  men  and 
women  in  every  rank  of  life  who  were  able  to  leaven 
that  lump.  But  the  political  element  in  th's  war  was 
of  such  importance  as  to  lead  to  a  startling  result ; 
the  North  came  nearest  to  yielding  at  a  time  when  in 
a  military  sense  its  success  had  become  sure.  To 
preserve  a  united  North  was  the  greatest  and  one  of 
the  hardest  of  the  duties  of  President  Lincoln. 

To  a  civilian  reader  the  history  of  the  war,  in  spite  of 
the  picturesque  incidents  of  many  battles,  may  easily 
be  made  dreary.  Till  far  on  in  the  lengthy  process  of 
subjecting  the  South,  we  might  easily  become  immersed 
in  some  iutile  story  of  how  General  X.  was  superseded 
by  General  Y.  in  a  command,  for  which  neither  discovered 


THE  CONDITIONS  OF  THE  WAR        219 

any  purpose  but  that  of  not  co-operating  with  General  Z. 
And  this  impression  is  not  merely  due  to  our  failure 
to  understand  the  difficulties  which  confronted  these 
gallant  officers.  The  dearth  of  trained  military  faculty, 
which  was  felt  at  the  outset,  could  only  be  made  good 
by  the  training  which  the  war  itself  supplied.  Such 
commanders  as  Grant  and  Sherman  and  Sheridan  not 
only  could  not  have  been  recognised  at  the  beginning 
of  the  war  ;  they  were  not  then  the  soldiers  that  they 
afterwards  became.  And  the  want  was  necessarily 
very  serious  in  the  case  of  the  higher  commands  which 
required  the  movement  of  large  forces,  the  control  of 
subordinates  each  of  whom  must  have  a  wide  discretion, 
and  the  energy  of  intellect  and  will  necessary  for 
resolving  the  more  complex  problems  of  strategy.  We 
are  called  upon  to  admire  upon  both  sides  the  devotion 
of  forgotten  thousands,  and  to  admire  upon  the  side  of 
the  South  the  brilliant  and  daring  operations  by  which 
in  so  many  battles  Lee  and  Jackson  defeated  superior 
forces.  On  the  Northern  side,  later  on,  great  generals 
came  to  view,  but  it  is  in  the  main  a  different  sort  of 
achievement  which  we  are  called  upon  to  appreciate. 
An  Administration  appointed  to  direct  a  stupendous 
operation  of  conquest  was  itself  of  necessity  ill  prepared 
for  such  a  task  ;  behind  it  were  a  Legislature  and  a 
public  opinion  equally  ill  prepared  to  support  and  to 
assist  it.  There  were  in  its  military  service  many 
intelligent  and  many  enterprising  men,  but  none,  at 
first,  scLjCDjaibioii^  that  he 

could  grapple  with  any  great  responsibility  or  that  the 
civil  power  would  have  been  warranted  in  "reposing 
complete  confidence  in  him.  The  history  of  the  war  has 
to  be  recounted  in  this  volume  chiefly  with  a  view  to 
these  difficulties  of  the  Administration. 

One  of  the  most  interesting  features  of  the  war  would, 
in  any  military  study  of  it,  be  seen  to  be  the  character 
of  the  troops  on  both  sides.  On  both  sides  their  in 
dividual  quality  was  high  ;  on  both,  circumstances  and 
the  disposition  of  the  people  combined  to  make  discipline 
weak.  This  character,  common  to  the  two  armies, 


220  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

was  conspicuous  in  many  battles  of  the  war,  but  a 
larger  interest  attaches  to  the  policy  of  the  two  ad 
ministrations  in  raising  and  organising  their  civilian 
armies.  The  Southern  Government,  if  its  proceedings 
-''were  studied  in  detail,  would  probably  seem  to  have 
been  better  advised  at  the  start  on  matters  of  military 
organisation ;  for  instance,  it  had  early  and  long 
retained  a  superiority  in  cavalry  which  was  not  a  mere 
result  of  good  fortune.  But  here,  too,  there  was  an 
inherent  advantage  in  the  very  fact  that  the  South  had 
started  upon  a  desperate  venture.  There  can  hardly 
be  a  more  difficult  problem  of  detail  for  statesmen  than 
the  co-ordination  of  military  and  civil  requirements 
in  the  raising  of  an  army.  But  in  the  South  all  civil 
/considerations  merged  themselves  in  the  paramount 
/necessity  of  a  military  success  for  which  all  knew  the 
I  utmost  effort  was  needed.  The  several  States  of  the 
South,  claiming  as  they  did  a  far  larger  independence 
than  the  Northern  States,  knew  that  they  could  only 
make  that  claim  good  by  being  efficient  members  of  the 
Confederacy.  Thus  it  was  comparatively  easy  for  the 
Confederate  Government  to  adopt  and  maintain  a 
consecutive  policy  in  this  matter,  and  though,  from 
the  conditions  of  a  widely  spread  agricultural  population, 
voluntary  enlistment  produced  poor  results  at  the 
beginning  of  the  war,  it  appears  to  have  been  easy  to 
introduce  quite  early  an  entirely  compulsory  system  of 
a  stringent  kind. 

The  introduction  of  compulsory  service  in  the  'North 
has  its  place  in  our  subsequent  story.  The  system  that 
preceded  it  need  not  be  dwelt  upon  here,  because,  full 
of  instruction  as  a  technical  study  of  it  (such  as  has  been 
made  by  Colonel  Henderson)  must  be,  no  brief  survey 
by  an  amateur  could  be  useful.  It  is  necessary,  however, 
to  understand  the  position  in  which  Lincoln's  Ad 
ministration  was  placed,  w'thout  much  experience  in 
America,  or  perhaps  elsewhere  in  the  world,  to  guide  it. 
It  must  not  be  contended,  for  it  cannot  be  known  that 
the  problem  was  fully  and  duly  envisaged  by  Lincoln 
on  his  Cabinet,  but  it  would  probably  in  any  case  have 


THE  CONDITIONS  OF  THE   WAR        221 

been  impossible  for  them  to  pursue  from  the  first  a 
consecutive  and  well  thought  out  policy  for  raising  an 
army  and  keeping  up  its  strength.  The  position  of  the 
North  differed  fundamentally  from  that  of  the  South  ; 
the  North  experienced  neitherjthe  ardour  nor  jhe_  throes 
nf_a  revolution  ;  it  was  never  in  any  fear  of  being 
conquered,  onh^of  not  conquering.  There  was  nothing, 
therefore,  which  at  once  bestowed  on  the  Government  a 
moralpower  over  the  country  vastly  in  excess  of  that 
w^ITiFexeraseTmnQormal  times.  This,  however,  was 
really  necessary  IxTTf  if  the  problem  of  the  Army  was 
to  be  handled  in  the  way  which  was  desirable  from  a 
military  point  of  view.  Compulsory  service  could  not 
at  first  be  'thought  of.  It  was  never  supposed  that 
the  tiny  regular  Army  of  the  United  States  Govern 
ment  could  be  raised  to  any  very  great  size  by  voluntary 
enlistment,  and  the  limited  increase  of  it  which  was 
attempted  was  not  altogether  successful.  The  existing 
militia  system  of  the  several  States  was  almost  im 
mediately  found  faulty  and  was  discarded.  A  great 
Volunteer  Force  had  to  be  raised  which  should  be  under 
the  command  of  the  President,  who  by  the  Constitution 
is  Commander-in-Chief  of  the  forces  of  the  Union,  but 
which  must  be  raised  in  each  State  by  the  State  Governor 
(or,  if  he  was  utterly  wanting,  by  leading  local  citizens). 
Now  State  Governors  are  not — it  must  be  recalled — 
officers  under  the  President,  but  independent  potentates 
acting  usually  in  as  much  detachment  from  him  as  the 
Vice-Chancellor  of  Oxford  or  Cambridge  from  the 
Board  of  Education  or  a  Presbyterian  minister  from  a 
bishop.  This  group  of  men,  for  the  most  part  able, 
patriotic,  and  determined,  were  there  to  be  used  and 
had  to  be  consulted.  It  follows  that  the  policy  of  the 
North  in  raising  and  organising  its  armies  had  at  first 
to  be  a  policy  evolved  between  numerous  independent 
authorities  which  never  met  and  were  held  together  by 
a  somewhat  ignorant  public  opinion,  sometimes  much 
depressed  and  sometimes,  which  was  worse,  over- 
sanguine.  It  is  impossible  to  judge  exactly  how  ill  or 
how  well  Lincoln,  under  such  circumstances,  grappled 


222  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

with  this  particular  problem,  but  many  anomalies  which 
seem  to  us  preposterous — the  raising  of  raw  new 
regiments  when  fine  seasoned  regiments  were  short  of 
half  their  strength,  and  so  forth — were  in  these 
circumstances  inevitable.  The  national  system  of  re 
cruiting,  backed  by  compulsion,  which  was  later  set  up, 
still  required  for  its  success  the  co-operation  of  State  and 
local  authorities  of  this  wholly  independent  character. 

Northern  and  Southern  armies  alike  had  necessarily 
to  be  commanded  to  a  great  extent  by  amateur  officers  ; 
the  number  of  officers,  in  the  service  or  retired,  who 
had  been  trained  at  West  Point,  was  immeasurably  too 
small  for  the  needs  of  the  armies.  Amateurs  had  to  be 
called  in,  and  not  only  so,  but  they  had  in  some  cases 
to  be  given  very  important  commands.  Thg__jiot 
-altogether  unwholesome  tradition  that  -a— seltreliant 
man  can  turn  his  hand  to  anything  was  -ofLcourse  very 
_fetfbng  in  America,  and  the  short  military  annals  of  the 
country  had  been  thought  to  have  added  some  illustrious 
instances  to  the  roll  of  men  of  peace  who  have  distin 
guished  themselves  in  arms.  So  a  political  leader,  no 
matter  whether  he  was  Democrat  or  Republican,  who 
was  a  man  of  known  general  capacity,  would  sometimes 
at  first  seem  suitable  for  an  important  command  rather 
than  the  trained  but  unknown  professional  soldier 
who  was  the  alternative.  Moreover,  it  seemed  foolish 
not  to  appoint  him,  when,  as  sometimes  happened,  he 
could  bring  thousands  of  recruits  from  his  State.  The 
Civil  War  turned  out,  however,  to  show  the  superiority 
of  the  duly  trained  military  mind  in  a  marked  degree. 
Some  West- Pointers  of  repute  of  course  proved  incapable, 
and  a  great  many  amateur  colonels  and  generals,  both 
North  and  South,  attained  a  very  fair  level  of  com 
petence  in  the  service  (the  few  conspicuous  failures  seem 
to  have  been  quite  exceptional)  ;  but,  all  the  same, 
of  the  many  clever  and  stirring  men  who  then  took  up 
soldiering  as  novices  and  served  for  four  years,  not 
one  achieved  brilliant  success  ;  of  the  generals  in  the 
war  whose  names  are  remembered,  some  had  indeed 
passed  years  in  civil  life,  but  every  one  had  received 


THE   CONDITIONS  OF  THE  WAR        223 

a  thorough  military  training  in  the  years  of  his  early 
manhood.  It  certainly  does  not  appear  that  the 
Administration  was  really  neglectful  of  professional 
merit  ;  it  hungered  to  find  it  ;  but  many  appoint 
ments  must  at  first  have  been  made  in  a  haphazard 
fashion,  for  there  was  no  machinery  for  sifting  claims. 
A  zealous  but  unknown  West-Pointer  put  under  an 
outsider  would  be  apt  to  write  as  Sherman  did  in  early 
days  :  "  Mr.  Lincoln  meant  to  insult  me  and  the 
Army  "  ;  and  a  considerable  jealousy  evidently  arose 
between  West-Pointers  and  amateurs.  It  was  aggra 
vated  by  the  rivalry  between  officers  of  the  Eastern 
army  and  those  of  the,  more  largely  amateur,  Western 
army.  The  amateurs,  too,  had  something  to  say  on 
their  side ;  they  were  apt  to  accuse  West-Pointers  as  a 
class  of  a  cringing  belief  that  the  South  was  invincible. 
There  was  nothing  unnatural  or  very  serious  in  all  this,but 
political  influences  which  arose  later  caused  complaints 
of  this  nature  to  be  made  the  most  of,  and  a  general 
charge  to  be  made  against  Lincoln's  Administration  of 
appointing  generals  and  removing  them  under  improper 
political  influences.  This  general  charge,  however, 
rests  upon  a  limited  number  of  alleged  instances,  and 
all  of  these  which  are  of  any  importance  will  necessarily 
be  examined  in  later  chapters. 

It  may  be  useful  to  a  reader  who  wishes  to  follow  the 
main  course  of  the  war  carefully,  if  the  chief  ways  in 
which  geographical  facts  affected  it  are  here  summarised 
— necessarily  somewhat  drily.  Minor  operations  at 
outlying  points  on  the  coast  or  in  the  Far  West  will  be 
left  out  of  account,  so  also  will  a  serious  political  con 
sideration,  which  we  shall  later  see  caused  doubt  for  a 
time  as  to  the  proper  strategy  of  the  North. 

It  must  be  noted  first,  startling  as  it  may  be  to 
Englishmen  who  remember  the  war  partly  by  the 
exploits  of  the  Alabama,  that  the  naval  superiority  of 
the  North  was  overwhelming.  In  spite  of  many  gallant 
efforts  by  the  Southern  sailors,  the  North  could  blockade 
their  coasts  and  could  capture  most  of  the  Southern 
ports  long  before  its  superiority  on  land  was  estab- 


224  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

lished.  Turning  then  to  land,  we  may  treat  the  political 
frontier  between  the  two  powers,  after  a  short  pre 
liminary  stage  of  war,  as  being  marked  by  the  southern 
boundaries  of  Maryland,  West  Virginia,  Kentucky, 
and  Missouri,  just  as  they  are  seen  on  the  map 
to-day.  In  doing  so,  we  must  note  that  at  the  com 
mencement  of  large  operations  parts  of  Kentucky  and 
Missouri  were  occupied  by  Southern  invading  forces. 
This  frontier  is  cut,  not  far  from  the  Atlantic,  by  the 
parallel  mountain  chains  which  make  up  the  Alleghanies 
or  Appalachians.  These  in  effect  separated  the  field  of 
operations  into  a  narrow  Eastern  theatre  of  war,  and  an 
almost  boundless  Western  theatre  ;  and  the  operations 
in  these  two  theatres  were  almost  to  the  end  indepen 
dent  of  each  other. 

In  the  Eastern  theatre  of  war  lies  Washington,  the 
capital  of  the  Union,  a  place  of  great  importance  to  the 
North  for  obvious  reasons,  and  especially  because  if 
it  fell  European  powers  would  be  likely  to  recognise 
the  Confederacy.  It  lies,  on  the  Potomac,  right  upon 
the  frontier ;  and  could  be  menaced  also  in  the  rear, 
for  the  broad  and  fertile  trough  between  the  mountain 
chains  formed  by  the  valley  of  the  Shenandoah  River, 
which  flows  northward  to  join  the  Potomac  at  a  point 
north-west  of  Washington,  was  in  Confederate  hands 
and  formed  a  sort  of  sally-port  by  which  a  force  from 
Richmond  could  get  almost  behind  Washington.  A 
hundred  miles  south  of  Washington  lay  Richmond, 
which  shortly  became  the  capital  of  the  Confederates, 
instead  of  Montgomery  in  Alabama.  As  a  brand  new 
capital  it  mattered  little  to  the  Confederates,  though 
at  the  very  end  of  the  war  it  became  their  last  remain 
ing  stronghold.  The  intervening  country,  which  was 
in  Southern  hands,  was  extraordinarily  difficult.  The 
reader  may  notice  on  the  map  the  rivers  with  broad 
estuaries  which  are  its  most  marked  features,  and  with 
the  names  of  which  we  shall  become  familiar.  The 
rivers  themselves  were  obstacles  to  an  invading  Northern 
army ;  their  estuaries  on  the  other  hand  soon  afforded 
it  safe  communication  by  sea. 


THE   CONDITIONS   OF  THE  WAR        225 

In  the  Western  theatre  of  war  we  must  remember 
first  the  enormous  length  of  frontier  in  proportion  to  the 
population  on  either  side.  This  necessarily  made  the 
progress  of  Northern  invasion  slow,  and  its  proper 
direction  hard  to  determine,  for  diversions  could  be 
created  by  a  counter-invasion  elsewhere  along  the 
frontier  or  a  stroke  at  the  invaders'  communications. 
The  principal  feature  of  the  whole  region  is  the  great 
waterways,  on  which  the  same  advantages  which  gave 
the  sea  to  the  North  gave  it  also  an  immense  superiority 
in  the  river  warfare  of  flotillas  of  gunboats.  When  the 
North  with  its  gunboats  could  get  control  of  the 
Mississippi  the  South  would  be  deprived  of  a  considerable 
part  of  its  territory  and  resources,  and  cut  off  from  its 
last  means  of  trading  with  Europe  (save  for  the  relief 
afforded  by  blockade-runners)  by  being  cut  off  from 
Mexico  and  its  ports.  Further,  when  the  North  could 
control  the  tributaries  of  the  Mississippi,  especially 
the  Cumberland  and  the  Tennessee  which  flow  into  the 
great  river  through  the  Ohio,  it  would  cut  deep  into  the 
internal  communications  of  the  South.  Against  this 
menace  the  South  could  only  contend  by  erecting 
powerful  fortresses  on  the  rivers,  and  the  capture  of 
some  of  them  was  the  great  object  of  the  earlier  Northern 
operations. 

The  railway  system  of  the  South  must  also  be  taken 
into  account  in  connection  with  their  waterways.  This, 
of  course,  cannot  be  seen  on  a  modern  map.  Perhaps 
the  following  may  make  the  main  points  clear.  The 
Southern  railway  system  touched  the  Mississippi  and 
the  world  beyond  it  at  three  points  only  :  Memphis, 
Vicksburg,  and  New  Orleans.  A  traveller  wishing  to 
go,  say,  from  Richmond  by  rail  towards  the  West 
could  have,  if  distance  were  indifferent  to  him,  a  choice 
of  three  routes  for  part  of  the  way.  He  could  go  through 
Knoxville  in  Tennessee  to  Chattanooga  in  that  State, 
where  he  had  a  choice  of  routes  further  West,  or  he 
could  take  one  of  two  alternative  lines  south  into 
Georgia  and  thence  go  either  to  Atlanta  or  to  Columbus 
in  the  west  of  that  State.  Arrived  at  Atlanta  or 


226  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Columbus  he  could  proceed  further  West  either  by 
making  a  detour  northwards  through  Chattanooga  or 
by  making  a  detour  southwards  through  the  seaport 
town  of  Mobile,  crossing  the  harbour  by  boat.  Thus 
the  capture  of  Chattanooga  from  the  South  would  go  far 
towards  cutting  the  whole  Southern  railway  system  in 
two,  and  the  capture  of  Mobile  would  complete  it. 
Lastly,  we  may  notice  two  lines  running  north  and  south 
through  the  State  of  Mississippi,  one  through  Corinth 
and  Meridian,  and  the  other  nearer  the  great  river. 
From  this  and  the  course  of  the  rivers  the  strategic 
importance  of  some  of  the  towns  mentioned  may  be 
partly  appreciated. 

The  subjugation  of  the  South  in  fact  began  by  a 
process,  necessarily  slow  and  much  interrupted,  whereby 
having  been  blockaded  by  sea  it  was  surrounded  by 
land,  cut  off  from  its  Western  territory,  and  deprived 
of  its  main  internal  lines  of  communication.  Richmond, 
against  which  the  North  began  to  move  within  the  first 
three  months  of  the  war,  did  not  fall  till  nearly  four  years 
later,  when  the  process  just  described  had  been  com 
pleted,  and  when  a  Northern  army  had  triumphantly 
progressed,  wasting  the  resources  of  the  country  as  it 
went,  from  Chattanooga  to  Atlanta,  thence  to  the  Atlantic 
coast  of  Georgia,  and  thence  northward  through  the 
two  Carolinas  till  it  was  about  to  join  hands  with  the 
army  assailing  Richmond.  Throughout  this  time  the 
attention  of  a  large  part  of  the  Northern  public  and  of  all 
those  who  watched  the  war  from  Europe  was  naturally 
fastened  to  a  great  extent  upon  the  desperate  fighting 
which  occurred  in  the  region  of  Washington  and  of 
Richmond  and  upon  the  ill-success  of  the  North  in 
endeavours  of  unforeseen  difficulty  against  the  latter 
city.  We  shall  see,  however,  that  the  long  and  humiliat 
ing  failure  of  the  North  in  this  quarter  was  neither  so 
unaccountable  nor  nearly  so  important  as  it  appeared. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


THE    OPENING    OF    THE    WAR    AND    LINCOLN 
ADMINISTRATION 

I.  Preliminary  Stages. 

ON  the  morning  after  the  bombardment  of  Fort 
Sumter  there  appeared  a  Proclamation  by  the  President 
calling  upon  the  Militia  of  the  several  States  to  furnish 
75,000  men  for  the  service  of  the  United  States  in  the 
suppression  of  an  "  unlawful  combination."  They  were  to 
serve  for  three  months,  since  this  was  the  longest  period 
for  which  by  law  they  could  be  called  out,  and  in  further 
compliance  with  the  law  upon  this  subject  the  President 
summoned  Congress  to  meet  in  extraordinary  session 
upon  July  4.  The  Army  already  in  the  service  of  the 
United  States  consisted  of  but  16,000  officers  and  men, 
and,  though  the  men  of  this  force,  being  less  affected  by 
State  ties  than  their  officers,  remained,  as  did  the  men 
of  the  Navy,  true  almost  without  exception  to  their 
allegiance,  all  but  3,000  of  them  were  unavailable  and 
scattered  in  small  .  frontier  forts  in  the  West.  A  few 
days  later,  when  it  became  plain  that  the  struggle  might 
long  outlast  the  three  months  of  the  Militia,  the 
President  called  for  Volunteers  to  enlist  for  three  years' 
service,  and  perhaps  (for  the  statements  are  conflicting) 
some  300,000  troops  of  one  kind  and  another  had  been 
raised  by  June. 

The  affair  of  Fort  Sumter  and  the  President's  Pro^j 
clamation  at  once  aroused  and  concentrated  the  whole  V 
public  opinion  of  the  free  States  in  the  North  and,  in 
an   opposite   sense,   of  the    States   which   had>  already 
seceded.     The  border  slave  States  had  now  to  declare 
for  the  one  side  or  for  the  other.     Virginia  as  a  whole 
joined  the  Southern  Confederacy  forthwith,  but  several 


228  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Counties  in  the  mountainous  region  of  the  west  of  that 
State  were  strongly  for  the  Union.  These  eventually 
succeeded  with  the  support  of  Northern  troops  in 
separating  from  Virginia  and  forming  the  new  State  of 
West  Virginia.  Tennessee  also  joined  the  South,  though 
in  Eastern  Tennessee  the  bulk  of  the  people  held  out  for 
the  Union  without  such  good  fortune  as  their  neighbours 
in  West  Virginia.  Arkansas  beyond  the  Mississippi 
followed  the  same  example,  though  there  was  some 
doubt  and  division  in  all  parts  of  that  State.  In 
Delaware,  where  the  slaves  were  very  few,  the  Governor 
did  not  formally  comply  with  the  President's  Pro 
clamation,  but  the  people  as  a  whole  responded  to  it. 
The  attitude  of  Maryland,  which  almost  surrounds 
Washington,  kept  the  Government  at  the  capital  in 
suspense  and  alarm  for  a  while,  for  both  the  city  of 
Baltimore  and  the  existing  State  legislature  were 
inclined  to  the  South.  In  Kentucky  and  Missouri  the 
State  authorities  were  also  for  the  South,  and  it  was 
only  after  a  struggle,  and  in  Missouri  much  actual 
fighting,  that  the  Unionist  majority  of  the  people  in 
each  State  had  its  way. 

The  secession  of  Virginia  had  consequences  even 
more  important  than  the  loss  to  the  Union  of  a  powerful 
State.  General  Robert  E.  Lee,  a  Virginian,  then  in 
Washington,  was  esteemed  by  General  Scott  to  be  the 
ablest  officer  in  the  service.  Lincoln  and  his  Secretary 
of  War  desired  to  confer  on  him  the  command  of  the 
Army.  Lee's  decision  was  made  with  much  reluctance 
and,  it  seems,  hesitation.  He  was  not  only  opposed 
to  the  policy  of  secession  but  denied  the  right  of  a 
State  to  secede  ;  yet  he  believed  that  his  absolute 
allegiance  was  due  to  Virginia.  He  resigned  his  com 
mission  in  the  United  States  Army,  went  to  Richmond, 
and,  in  accordance  with  what  Wolseley  describes  as  the 
prevailing  principle  that  had  influenced  most  of  the 
soldiers  he  met  in  the  South,  placed  his  sword  at  the 
disposal  of  his  own  State.  The  same  loyalty  to  Virginia 
governed  another  great  soldier,  Thomas  J.  Jackson, 
whose  historic  nickname,  "  Stonewall,"  fails  to  convey 


THE   OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  229 

the  dashing  celerity  of  his  movements.  While  they 
both  lived  these  two  men  were  to  be  linked  together  in 
the  closest  comradeship  and  mutual  trust.  They  sprang 
from  different  social  conditions  and  were  of  contrasting 
types.  The  epithet  Cavalier  has  been  fitly  enough 
applied  to  Lee,  and  Jackson,  after  conversion  from  the 
wild  courses  of  his  youth,  was  an  austere  Puritan. 
To  quote  again  from  a  soldier's  memoirs,  Wolseley  calls 
Lee  "  one  of  the  few  men  who  ever  seriously  impressed 
and  awed  me  with  their  natural,  their  inherent,  great 
ness  "  ;  he  speaks  of  his  "  majesty,"  and  of  the  "  beauty," 
of  his  character,  and  of  the  "  sweetness  of  his  smile  and 
the  impressive  dignity  of  the  old-fashioned  style  of  his 
address  "  ;  "  his  greatness,"  he  says,  "  made  me 
humble."  "  There  was  nothing,"  he  tells  us,  "  of  these 
refined  characteristics  in  Stonewall  Jackson,"  a  man 
with  "  huge  hands  and  feet."  But  he  possessed  "  an 
assured  self-confidence,  the  outcome  of  his  sure  trust  in 
God.  How  simple,  how  humble-minded  a  man.  As  his 
impressive  eyes  met  yours  unflinchingly,  you  knew  that 
his  was  an  honest  heart."  To  this  he  adds  touches  less 
to  be  expected  concerning  a  Puritan  warrior,  whose 
Puritanism  was  in  fact  inclined  to  ferocity — how 
Jackson's  "  remarkable  eyes  lit  up  for  the  moment  with 
a  look  of  real  enthusiasm  as  he  recalled  the  architectural 
beauty  of  the  seven  lancet  windows  in  York  Minster," 
how  "  intense  "  was  the  "  benignity  "  of  his  expression, 
and  how  in  him  it  seemed  that  "  great  strength  of 
character  and  obstinate  determination  were  united  with 
extreme  gentleness  of  disposition  and  with  absolute 
tenderness  towards  all  about  him."  Men  such  as  these 
brought  to  the  Southern  cause  something  besides  their 
military  capacity ;  but  as  to  the  greatness  of  that 
capacity,  applied  in  a  war  in  which  the  scope  was  so 
great  for  individual  leaders  of  genius,  there  is  no 
question.  A  civilian  reader,  looking  in  the  history  of 
war  chiefly  for  the  evidences  of  personal  quality,  can 
at  least  discern  in  these  two  famous  soldiers  the  moral 
daring  which  in  doubtful  circumstances  never  flinches 
from  the  responsibility  of  a  well-considered  risk,  and, 


23o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

in  both  their  cases  as  in  those  of  some  other  great 
commanders,  can  recognise  in  this  rare  and  precious 
attribute  the  outcome  of  their  personal  piety.  We 
shall  henceforth  have  to  do  with  the  Southern  Con 
federacy  and  its  armies,  not  in  their  inner  history  but 
with  sole  regard  to  the  task  which  they  imposed  upon 
Lincoln  and  the  North.  But  at  this  parting  of  the  ways 
a  tribute  is  due  to  the  two  men,  pre-eminent  among 
many  devoted  people,  who,  in  their  soldier-like  and 
unreflecting  loyalty  to  their  cause,  gave  to  it  a  lustre  in 
which,  so  far  as  they  can  be  judged,  neither  its  statesmen 
nor  its  spiritual  guides  had  a  share. 

There  were  Virginian  officers  of  the  Navy  and  Army 
who  did  not  thus  go  with  their  State,  and  of  these  were 
Admiral  Farragut,  General  Scott,  and  General  Thomas. 

Throughout  the  free  States  of  the  North  there  took 
place 'a  national  uprising  of  which  none  who  remember 
it  have  spoken  without  feeling  anew  its  spontaneous 
ardour.  Men  flung  off  with  delight  the  hesitancy  of  the 
preceding  months,  and  recruiting  went  on  with  speed 
and  enthusiasm.  Party  divisions  for  the  moment  dis 
appeared.  Old  Buchanan  made  public  his  adhesion  to 
the  Government.  Douglas  called  upon  Lincoln  to  ask 
how  best  he  could  serve  the  public  cause,  and  at  his 
request,  went  down  to  Illinois  to  guide  opinion  and 
advance  recruiting  there  ;  so  employed,  the  President's 
great  rival,  shortly  after,  fell  ill  and  died,  leaving  the 
leadership  of  the  Democrats  to  be  filled  thereafter  by 
more  scrupulous  but  less  patriotic  men.  There  was 
exultant  confidence  in  the  power  of  the  nation  to  put 
down  rebellion,  and  those  who  realised  the  peril  in  which 
for  many  days  the  capital  and  the  administration 
were  placed  were  only  the  more  indignantly  determined. 
Perhaps  the  most  trustworthy  record  of  popular 
emotions  is  to  be  found  in  popular  humorists.  Shortly 
after  these  days  Artemus  Ward,  the  author  who  almost 
vied  with  Shakespeare  in  Lincoln's  affections,  relates 
how  the  confiscation  of  his  show  in  the  South  led  him 
to  have  an  interview  with  Jefferson  Davis.  "  Even 
now,"  said  Davis,  in  this  pleasant  fiction,  "  we  have 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  231 

many  frens  in  the  North."  "  J.  Davis,"  is  the  reply, 
"  there's  your  grate  mistaik.  Many  of  us  was  your 
sincere  frends,  and  thought  certin  parties  amung  us 
was  fussin'  about  you  and  meddlin'  with  your  consarns 
intirely  too  much.  But,  J.  Davis,  the  minit  you  fire 
a  gun  at  the  piece  of  dry  goods  called  the  Star-Spangled 
Banner,  the  North  gits  up  and  rises  en  massy,  in  defence 
of  that  banner.  Not  agin  you  as  individooals — not 
agin  the  South  even — but  to  save  the  flag.  We  should 
indeed  be  weak  in  the  knees,  unsound  in  the  heart, 
milk-white  in  the  liver,  and  soft  in  the  hed,  if  we  stood 
quietly  by  and  saw  this  glorus  Govyment  smashed  to 
pieces,  either  by  a  furrin  or  a  intestine  foe.  The  gentle- 
harted  mother  hates  to  take  her  naughty  child  across 
her  knee,  but  she  knows  it  is  her  dooty  to  do  it.  So 
we  shall  hate  to  whip  the  naughty  South,  but  we  must 
do  it  if  you  don't  make  back  tracks  at  onct,  and  we 
shall  wallup  you  out  of  your  boots  !  "  In  the  days 
which  followed,  when  this  prompt  chastisement  could 
not  be  effected  and  it  seemed  indeed  as  if  the  South 
would  do  most  of  the  whipping,  the  discordant  elements 
which  mingled  in  this  unanimity  soon  showed  them 
selves.  The  minority  that  opposed  the  war  was  for  a 
time  silent  and  insignificant,  but  among  the  supporters 
of  the  war  there  were  those  who  loved  the  Union  and 
the  Constitution  and  who,  partly  for  this  very  reason, 
had  hitherto  cultivated  the  sympathies  of  the  South. 
These — adherents  mainly  of  the  Democratic  party — 
would  desire  that  civil  war  should  be  waged  with  the 
least  possible  breach  of  the  Constitution,  and  be  con 
cluded  with  the  least  possible  social  change  ;  many  of 
them  would  wish  to  fight  not  to  a  finish  but  to  a  com 
promise.  On  the  other  hand  there  were  those  who  loved 
liberty  and  hated  alike  the  slave  system  of  the  South 
and  the  arrogance  which  it  had  engendered.  These — 
the  people  distinguished  within  the  Republican  party  as 
Radicals — would  pay  little  heed  to  constitutional 
restraints  in  repelling  an  attack  on  the  Constitution, 
and  they  would  wish  from  the  first  to  make  avowed 
war  upon  that  which  caused  the  war — slavery.  In  the 


232  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

border  States  there  was  of  course  more  active  sympathy 
with  the  South,  and  in  conflict  with  this  the  Radicalism 
of  some  of  these  States  became  more  stalwart  and 
intractable.  To  such  causes  of  dissension  was  added 
as  time  went  on  sheer  fatigue  of  the  war,  and  strangely 
enough  this  influence  was  as  powerful  with  a  few 
Radicals  as  it  was  with  the  ingrained  Democratic  par 
tisans.  They  despaired  of  the  result  when  success  at 
last  was  imminent,  and  became  sick  of  bloodshed  when 
it  passed  what  they  presumably  regarded  as  a  reasonable 
amount. 

It  was  the  task  of  the  Administration  not  only  to 
conduct  the  war,  but  to  preserve  the  unity  of  the  North 
in  spite  of  differences  and  its  resolution  in  spite  of 
disappointments..  Lincoln  was  in  more  than  one  way 
well  fitted  for  this  task.  Old  experience  in  Illinois  and 
Kentucky  enabled  him  to  understand  very  different 
points  of  view  in  regard  to  the  cause  of  the  South. 
The  new  question  that  was  now  to  arise  about  slavery 
was  but  a  particular  form  of  the  larger  question  of 
principle  to  which  he  had  long  thought  out  an  answer 
as  firm  and  as  definite  as  it  was  moderate  and  in  a 
sense  subtle.  He  had,  moreover,  a  quality  of  heart 
which,  as  it  seemed  to  those  near  him,  the  protraction 
of  the  conflict,  with  its  necessary  strain  upon  him,  only 
strengthened.  In  him  a  tenacity,  which  scarcely  could 
falter  in  the  cause  which  he  judged  to  be  right,  was  not 
merely  pure  from  bitterness  towards  his  antagonists, 
it  was  actually  bound  up  with  a  deep-seated  kindliness 
towards  them.  Whatever  rank  may  be  assigned  to  his 
services  and  to  his  deserts,  it  is  first  and  foremost  in 
these  directions,  though  not  in  these  directions  alone, 
that  the  reader  of  his  story  must  look  for  them.  Upon 
attentive  study  he  will  probably  appear  as  the  embodi 
ment,  in  a  degree  and  manner  which  are  alike  rare,  of 
the  more  constant  and  the  higher  judgment  of  his 
people.  It  is  plainer  still  that  he  embodied  the  reso 
lute  purpose  which  underlay  the  fluctuations  upon  the 
surface  of  their  political  life.  The  English  military 
historians,  Wood  and  Edmonds,  in  their  retrospect  over 


THE   OPENING   OF  THE  WAR  233 

the  course  of  the  war,  well  sum  up  its  dramatic  aspect 
when  they  say  :  "  Against  the  great  military  genius  of 
certain  of  the  Southern  leaders  fate  opposed  the  un 
broken  resolution  and  passionate  devotion  to  the  Union, 
which  he  worshipped,  of  the  great  Northern  President. 
As  long  as  he  lived,  and  ruled  the  people  of  the  North, 
there  could  be  no  turning  back." 

XKere  are  plenty  of  indications  in  the  literature  of 
the  time  that  Lincoln's  determination  soon  began  to  be 
widely  felt  and  to  be  appreciated  by  common  people. 
Literally,  crowds  of  people  from  all  parts  of  the  North 
saw  him,  exchanged  a  sentence  or  two,  and  carried 
hom^  their  impressions  ;  and  those  who  were  near  him 
record  the  constant  fortitude  of  his  bearing,  noting  as 
marked  exceptions  the  unrestrained  words  of  impatience 
and  half-humorous  despondency  which  did  on  rare 
occasions  escape  him.  In  a  negative  way,  too,  even  the 
political  world  bore  its  testimony  to  this ;  his  ad 
ministration  was  charged  with  almost  every  other  forirf 
of  weakness,  but  there  was  never  a  suspicion  that  he 
would  give  in.  Nor  again,  in  the  severest  criticisms 
upon  him  by  knowledgeable  men  that  have  been 
unearthed  and  collected,  does  the  suggestion  of  petty 
personal  aims  or  of  anything  but  unselfish  devotion 
ever  find  a  place.  The  belief  that  he  could  be  trusted 
spread  itself  among  plain  people,  and,  given  this  belief, 
plain  people  liked  him  the  better  because  he  was  plain. 
But  if  at  the  distance  at  which  we  contemplate  him, 
and  at  which  from  the  moment  of  his  death  all  America 
contemplated  him,  certain  grand  traits  emerge,  it  is  not 
for  a  moment  to  be  supposed  that  in  his  life  he  stood 
out  in  front  of  the  people  as  a  great  leader,  or  indeed 
as  a  leader  at  all,  in  the  manner,  say,  of  Chatham  or 
even  of  Palmerston.  Lincoln  came  to  Washington 
doubtless  with  some  deep  thoughts  which  other  men 
had  not  thought,  doubtless  also  with  some  important 
knowledge,  for  instance  of  the  border  States,  which 
many  statesmen  lacked,  but  he  came  there  a  man 
inexperienced  in  affairs.  It  was  a  part  of  his  strength 
that  he  knew  this  very  well,  that  he  meant  to  learn, 


234  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

thought  he  could  learn,  did  not  mean  to  be  hurried  where 
he  had  not  the  knowledge  to  decide,  entirely  appreciated 
superior  knowledge  in  others,  and  was  entirely  unawed 
by  it.  But  Senators  and  Members  of  Congress  and 
journalists  of  high  standing,  as  a  rule,  perceived  the 
inexperience  and  not  the  strength.  The  deliberation 
with  which  he  acted,  patiently  watching  events,  saying 
little,  listening  to  all  sides,  conversing  with  a  naivete 
which  was  genuine  but  not  quite  artless,  seemingly 
obdurate  to  the  pressure  of  wise  counsels  on  one  side 
and  on  the  other — all  this  struck  many  anxious  observers 
as  sheer  incompetence,  and  when  there  was  just  and 
natural  cause  for  their  anxiety,  there  was  no  established 
presumption  of  his  wisdom  to  set  against  it.  And  this 
effect  was  enhanced  by  what  may  be  called  his  plainness, 
his  awkwardness,  and  actual  eccentricity  in  many  minor 
matters.  To  many  intelligent  people  who  met  him 
they  were  a  grievous  stumbling-block,  and  though  some 
most  cultivated  men  were  not  at  all  struck  by  them, 
and  were  pleased  instead  by  his  "  seeming  sincere,  and 
honest,  and  steady,"  or  the  like,  it  is  clear  that  no  one 
in  Washington  was  greatly  impressed  by  him  at  first 
meeting.  His  oddities  were  real  and  incorrigible. 
Young  John  Hay,  whom  Nicolay,  his  private  secretary, 
introduced  as  his  assistant,  a  humorist  like  Lincoln 
himself,  but  with  leanings  to  literary  elegance  and  a 
keen  eye  for  social  distinctions,  loved  him  all  along 
and  came  to  worship  him,  but  irreverent  amusement  is 
to  be  traced  in  his  recently  published  letters,  and  the 
glimpses  which  he  gives  us  of  "  the  Ancient  "  or  "  the 
Tycoon  "  when  quite  at  home  and  quite  at  his  ease 
fully  justify  him.  Lincoln  had  great  dignity  and  tact 
for  use  when  he  wanted  them,  but  he  did  not  always  see 
the  use  of  them.  Senator  Sherman  was  presented  to  the 
new  President.  "  So  you're  John  Sherman  ? "  said 
Lincoln.  "  Let's  see  if  you're  as  tall  as  I  am.  We'll 
measure."  The  grave  politician,  who  was  made  to 
stand  back  to  back  with  him  before  the  company  till 
this  interesting  question  was  settled,  dimly  perceived 
that  the  intention  was  friendly,  but  felt  that  there  was  a 


THE   OPENING  OF   THE  WAR  235 

lack  of  ceremony.  Lincoln's  height  was  one  of  his 
subjects  of  harmless  vanity  ;  many  tall  men  had  to 
measure  themselves  against  him  in  this  manner,  and 
probably  felt  like  John  Sherman.  On  all  sorts  of  oc 
casions  and  to  all  sorts  of  people  he  would  "  tell  a  little 
story,"  which  was  often  enough,  in  Lord  Lyons'  phrase, 
an  "  extreme  "  story.  This  was  the  way  in  which  he 
had  grown  accustomed  to  be  friendly  in  company  ;  it 
served  a  purpose  when  intrusive  questions  had  to  be 
evaded,  or  reproofs  or  refusals  to  be  given  without 
offence.  As  his  laborious  and  sorrowful  task  came 
to  weigh  heavier  upon  him,  his  capacity  for  play  of 
this  sort  became  a  great  resource  to  him.  As  his 
fame  became  established  people  recognised  him  as  a 
humorist  ;  the  inevitable  "  little  story "  became  to 
many  an  endearing  form  of  eccentricity  ;  but  w>  may 
be  sure  it  was  not  so  always  or  to  everybody.vX^ 

"  Those,"  says  Carl  Schurz,  a  political  exile  from 
Prussia,  who  did  good  service,  military  and  political, 
to  the  Northern  cause — "  those  who  visited  the  White 
House — and  the  White  House  appeared  to  be  open  to 
whomsoever  wished  to  enter — saw  there  a  man  of  un 
conventional  manners,  who,  without  the  slightest  effort 
to  put  on  dignity,  treated  all  men  alike,  much  like  old 
neighbours  ;  whose  speech  had  not  seldom  a  rustic 
flavour  about  it  ;  who  always  seemed  to  have  time  for 
a  homely  talk  and  never  to  be  in  a  hurry  to  press 
business  ;  and  who  occasionally  spoke  about  important 
affairs  of  State  with  the  same  nonchalance — I  might 
almost  say  irreverence — with  which  he  might  have  dis 
cussed  an  every-day  law  case  in  his  office  at  Springfield, 
Illinois." 

Thus  Lincoln  was  very  far  from  inspiring  general 
confidence  in  anything  beyond  his  good  intentions.  He 
is  remembered  as  a  personality  with  a  "  something  " 
about  him — the  vague  phrase  is  John  Bright's — which 
widely  endeared  him,  but  his  was  by  no  means  that 
"  magnetic  "  personality  which  we  might  be  led  to 
believe  was  indispensable  in  America.  Indeed,  it  is 
remarkable  that  to  some  really  good  judges  he  remained 


236  ABRAHAM   LINCOLN 

always  unimpressive.  Charles  Francis  Adams,  who 
during  the  Civil  War  served  his  country  as  well  as 
Minister  in  London  as  his  grandfather  had  done  after 
the  War  of  Independence,  lamented  to  the  end  that 
Seward,  his  immediate  chief,  had  to  serve  under  an 
inferior  man ;  and  a  more  sympathetic  man,  Lord 
Lyons,  our  representative  at  Washington,  refers  to 
Lincoln  with  nothing  more  than  an  amused  kindliness. 
No  detail  of  his  policy  has  escaped  fierce  criticism,  and 
the  man  himself  while  he  lived  was  the  subject  of  so 
much  depreciation  and  condescending  approval,  that 
we  are  forced  to  ask  who  discovered  his  greatness  till 
his  death  inclined  them  to  idealise  him.  The  answer  is 
that  precisely  those  Americans  of  trained  intellect 
whose  title  to  this  description  is  clearest  outside  America 
were  the  first  who  began  to  see  beneath  his  strange 
exterior.  Lowell,  watching  the  course  of  public  events 
with  ceaseless  scrutiny ;  Walt  Whitman,  sauntering  in 
Washington  in  the  intervals  of  the  labour,  among  the 
wounded  by  which  he  broke  down  his  robust  strength, 
and  seeing  things  as  they  passed  with  the  sure  obser 
vation  of  a  poet ;  Motley,  the  historian  of  the  Dutch 
Republic,  studying  affairs  in  the  thick  of  them  at  the 
outset  of  the  war,  and  not  less  closely  by  correspondence 
when  he  went  as  Minister  to  Vienna — such  men  when 
they  praised  Lincoln  after  his  death  expressed  a  judg 
ment  which  they  began  to  form  from  the  first ;  a  judg 
ment  which  started  with  the  recognition  of  his  honesty, 
traced  the  evidence  of  his  wisdom  as  it  appeared, 
gradually  and  not  by  repentant  impulse  learned  his 
greatness.  And  it  is  a  judgment  large  enough  to  explain 
the  lower  estimate  of  Lincoln  which  certainly  had  wide 
currency.  Not  to  multiply  witnesses,  Motley  in  June, 
1 86 1,  having  seen  him  for  the  second  time,  writes  :  "  I 
went  and  had  an  hour's  talk  with  Mr.  Lincoln.  I  am  very 
glad  of  it,  for,  had  I  not  done  so,  I  should  have  left 
Washington  with  a  very  inaccurate  impression  of  the 
President.  I  am  now  satisfied  that  he  is  a  man  of  very  con 
siderable  native  sagacity  ;  and  that  he  has  an  ingenuous, 
unsophisticated,  frank,  and  noble  character.  I  believe 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  237 

him  to  be  as  true  as  steel,  and  as  courageous  as  true. 
At  the  same  time  there  is  doubtless  an  ignorance  about 
State  matters,  and  particularly  about  foreign  affairs, 
which  he  does  not  attempt  to  conceal,  but  which  we 
must  of  necessity  regret  in  a  man  placed  in  such  a 
position  at  such  a  crisis.  Nevertheless  his  very  modesty 
in  this  respect  disarms  criticism.  We  parted  very 
affectionately,  and  perhaps  I  shall  never  set  eyes  on 
him  again,  but  I  feel  that,  so  far  as  perfect  integrity 
and  directness  of  purpose  go,  the  country  will  be  safe 
in  his  hands."  Three  years  had  passed,  and  the  political 
world  of  America  was  in  that  storm  of  general  dis 
satisfaction  in  which  not  a  member  of  Congress  would  be 
known  as  "  a  Lincoln  man,"  when  Motley  writes  again 
from  Vienna  to  his  mother,  "  I  venerate  Abraham 
Lincoln  exactly  because  he  is  the  true,  honest  type  of 
American  democracy.  Therejs__nothing  of  the  shabby- 
genteel,  the  would-be-but-couldn't-^ej&ne ,_ gentleman J 
fre  is  the  great  AmericaiTPegiQJjrKone_sJ'3  shrewd,  homely, 
'^iseThurnofous,  cheerful,  J^^v^bhmdering.  occasionally, 
s&ut~tErougH~  blunders  struggling  onwards  towards  what_ 
^F^diejve^jthFTight^ — ln~ a"~feter letter"  he  observes, 
"  His  mental  abilities  were  large,  and  they  became  the 
more  robust  as  the  more  weight  was  imposed  upon 
them."  . 

This  last  sentence,  especially  if  in  Lincoln's  mental 
abilities  the  qualities  of  his  character  be  included, 
probably  indicates  the  chief  point  for  remark  in  any 
estimate  of  his  presidency.  It  is  true  that  he  was 
judged  at  first  as  a  stranger  among  strangers.  Walt 
Whitman  has  described  vividly  a  scene,  with  "  a  dash  of 
comedy,  almost  farce,  such  as  Shakespeare  puts  in  his 
blackest  tragedies,"  outside  the  hotel  inj  New  York 
where  Lincoln  stayed  on  his  journey  to  Washington; 
"  his  look  and  gait,  his  perfect  composure  and  cool 
ness,"  to  cut  it  short,  the  usually  noted  marks  of  his 
eccentricity,  "  as  he  stood  looking  with  curiosity  on  that 
immense  sea  of  faces,  and  the  sea  of  faces  returned  the 
look  with  similar  curiosity,  not  a  single  one  "  among 
the  crowd  "  his  personal  friend."  He  was  not  much 


238  ABRAHAM   LINCOLN 

otherwise  situated  when  he  came  to  Washington.  It 
is  true  also  that  in  the  early  days  he  was  learning  his 
business.  "  Why,  Mr.  President,"  said  some  one  towards 
the  end  of  his  life,  "  you  have  changed  your  mind." 
"  Yes,  I  have,"  said  he,  "  and  I  don't  think  much  of  a 
man  who  isn't  wiser  to-day  than  he  was  yesterday." 
But  it  seems  to  be  above  all  true  that  the  exercise 
of  power  and  the  endurance  of  responsibility  gave  him 
•  new  strength.  This,  of  course,  cannot  be  demonstrated, 
I  but  Americans  then  living,  who  recall  Abraham  Lincoln, 
I  remark  most  frequently  how  the  man  grew  to  his  task. 
\  And  this  perhaps  is  the  main  impression  which  the  slight 
record  here  presented  will  convey,  the  impression  of 
a  man  quite  unlike  the  many  statesmen  whom  power 
and  the  vexations  attendant  upon  it  have  in  some 
piteous  way  spoiled  and  marred,  a  man  who  started  by 
being  tough  and  shrewd  and  canny  and  became  very 
strong  and  very  wise,  started  with  an  inclination  to 
honesty,  courage,  and  kindness,  and  became,  under  a 
tremendous  strain,  honest,  brave,  and  kind  to  an  almost 
tremendous  degree. 

The  North  then  started  upon  the  struggle  with  an 
eagerness  and  unanimity  from  which  the  revulsion  was 
to  try  all  hearts,  and  the  President's  most  of  all ;  and 
not  a  man  in  the  North  guessed  what  the  strain  of  that 
struggle  was  to  be.  At  first  indeed  there  was  alarm 
in  Washington  for  the  immediate  safety  of  the  city. 
Confederate  flags  could  be  seen  floating  from  the  hotels 
in  Alexandria  across  the  river  ;  Washington  itself  was 
full  of  rumours  of  plots  and  intended  assassinations,  and 
full  of  actual  Southern  spies  ;  everything  was  disorgan 
ised  ;  and  Lincoln  himself,  walking  round  one  night, 
found  the  arsenal  with  open,  doors,  absolutely  unguarded. 
By  April  20,  first  the  Navy  Yard  at  Gosport,  in 
Virginia,  had  to  be  abandoned,  then  the  Arsenal  at 
Harper's  Ferry,  and  on  the  day  of  this  latter  event  Lee 
went;  over  to  the  South.  One  regiment  from  Massa 
chusetts,  where  the  State  authorities  had  prepared  for 
war  before  the  fall  of  Sumter,  was  already  in  Washington ; 
but  it  had  had  to  fight  its  way  through  a  furious  mob 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  239 

in  Baltimore,  with  some  loss  of  life  on  both  sides.  A 
deputation  from  many  churches  in  that  city  came  to 
the  President,  begging  him  to  desist  from  his  blood 
thirsty  preparations,  but  found  him  "  constitutionally 
genial  and  jovial,"  and  "  wholly  inaccessible  to  Christian 
appeals."  It  mattered  more  that  a  majority  of  the 
Maryland  Legislature  was  for  the  South,  and  that  the 
Governor  temporised  and  requested  that  no  more  troops 
should  pass  through  Baltimore.  The  Mayor  of  Baltimore 
and  the  railway  authorities  burned  railway  bridges  and 
tore  up  railway  lines,  and  the  telegraph  wires  were  cut. 
Thus  for  about  five  days  the  direct  route  to  Washington 
from  the  North  was  barred.  It  seemed  as  if  the  boast 
of  some  Southern  orator  that  the  Confederate  flag  would 
float  over  the  capital  by  May  I  might  be  fulfilled. 
Beauregard  could  have  transported  his  now  drilled 
troops  by  rail  from  South  Carolina  and  would  have 
found  Washington  isolated  and  hardly  garrisoned.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  no  such  daring  move  was  contemplated 
in  the  South,  and  the  citizens  of  Richmond,  Virginia, 
were  themselves  under  a  similar  alarm ;  but  the  South 
had  a  real  opportunity. 

The  fall  of  Washington  at  that  moment  would  have 
had  political  consequences  which  no  one  realised  better 
than  Lincoln.  It  might  well  have  led  the  Unionists  in 
the  border  States  to  despair,  and  there  is  evidence  that 
even  then  he  so  fully  realised  the  task  which  lay  before 
the  North  as  to  feel  that  the  loss  of  Maryland,  Kentucky, 
and  Missouri  would  have  made  it  impossible.  He  was 
at  heart  intensely  anxious,  and  quaintly  and  in 
judiciously  relieved  his  feelings  by  the  remark  to  the 
"  6th  Massachusetts  "  that  he  felt  as  if  all  other  help 
were  a  dream,  and  they  were  "  the  only  real  thing." 
Yet  those  who  were  with  him  testify  to  his  composure 
and  to  the  vigour  with  which  he  concerted  with  his 
Cabinet  the  various  measures  of  naval,  military,  financial, 
postal,  and  police  preparation  which  the  occasion 
required,  but  which  need  not  here  be  detailed.  Many 
of  the  measures  of  course  lay  outside  the  powers  which 
Congress  had  conferred  on  the  public  departments,  but 


240  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  President  had  no  hesitation  in  "  availing  himself," 
as  he  put  it,  "  of  the  broader  powers  conferred  by  the 
Constitution  in  cases  of  insurrection,"  and  looking  for 
the  sanction  of  Congress  afterwards,  rather  than  "  let 
the  Government  at  once  fall  into  ruin."  The  difficulties 
of  government  were  greatly  aggravated  by  the  un 
certainty  as  to  which  of  its  servants,  civil,  naval,  or 
military,  were  loyal,  and  the  need  of  rapidly  filling  the 
many  posts  left  vacant  by  unexpected  desertion. 
Meanwhile  troops  from  New  England,  and  also  from  New 
York,  which  had  utterly  disappointed  some  natural 
expectations  in  the  South  by  the  enthusiasm  of  its  rally 
to  the  Union,  quickly  arrived  near  Baltimore.  They 
repaired  for  themselves  the  interrupted  railway  tracks 
round  the  city,  and  by  April  25  enough  soldiers  were 
in  Washington  to  put  an  end  to  any  present  alarm.  In 
case  of  need,  the  law  of  "  habeas  corpus  "  was  suspended 
in  Maryland.  The  President  had  no  wish  that  un 
necessary  recourse  should  be  had  to  martial  law. 
Naturally,  however,  one  of  his  generals  summarily 
arrested  a  Southern  recruiting  agent  in  Baltimore. 
The  ordinary  law  would  probably  have  sufficed,  and 
Lincoln  is  believed  to  have  regretted  this  action,  but 
it  was  obvious  that  he  must  support  it  when  done. 
Hence  arose  an  occasion  for  the  old  Chief  Justice  Taney 
to  make  a  protest  on  behalf  of  legality,  to  which  the 
President,  who  had  armed  force  on  his  side,  could  not 
give  way,  and  thus  early  began  a  controversy  to  which 
we  must  recur.  It  was  gravely  urged  upon  Lincoln 
that  he  should  forcibly  prevent  the  Legislature  of 
Maryland  from  holding  a  formal  sitting  ;  he  refused  on 
the  sensible  ground  that  the  legislators  could  assemble 
in  some  way  and  had  better  not  assemble  with  a  real 
grievance  in  constitutional  law.  Then  a  strange  altera 
tion  came  over  Baltimore.  Within  three  weeks  all 
active  demonstration  in  favour  of  the  South  had 
subsided ;  the  disaffected  Legislature  resolved  upon 
neutrality  ;  the  Governor,  loyal  at  heart — if  the  brief 
epithet  loyal  may  pass,  as  not  begging  any  profound 
legal  question — carried  on  affairs  in  the  interest  of  the 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE   WAR  241 

,  Union  ;  postal  communication  and  the  passage  of 
^troops  were  free  from  interruption  by  the  middle  of 
May ;  and  the  pressing  alarm  about  Maryland  was 
over.  These  incidents  of  the  first  days  of  war  have 
been  recounted  in  some  detail,  because  they  may  illus 
trate  the  gravity  of  the  issue  in  the  border  States,  in 
others  of  which  the  struggle,  though  further  removed 
from  observation,  lasted  longer ;  and  because,  too,  it  is 
well  to  realise  the  stress  of  agitation  under  which  the 
Government  had  to  make  far-reaching  preparation  for 
a  larger  struggle,  while  Lincoln,  whose  will  was  decisive 
in  all  these  measures,  carried  on  all  the  while  that 
seemingly  unimportant  routine  of  a  President's  life 
which  is  in  the  quietest  times  exacting. 

The  alarm  in  Washington  was  only  transitory,  ^and 
it  was  generally  supposed  in  the  North  that  insurrection 
would  be  easily  put  down.  Some  even  specified  the 
number  of  days  necessary,  agreeably  fixing  upon  a 
smaller  number  than  the  ninety  days  for  which  the 
militia  were  called  out.  Secretary  Seward  has  been 
credited  with  language  of  this  kind,  and  even  General 
Scott,  whose  political  judgment  was  feeble,  though  his 
military  judgment  was  sound, v  seems  at  first  to  have 
rejected  proposals,  for  example,  for  drilling  irregular 
cavalry,  made  in  the  expectation  of  a  war  of  some 
length.  There  is  evidence  that  neither  Lincoln  nor 
Cameron,  the  Secretary  of  War,  indulged  in  these 
pleasant  fancies.  Irresistible  public  opinion,  in  the 
East  especially,  demanded  to  see  prompt  activity.  The 
North  had  arisen  in  its  might  ;  it  was  for  the  Ad 
ministration  to  put  forth  that  might,  capture  Richmond, 
to  which  the  Confederate  Government  had  moved,  and 
therewith  make  an  end  of  rebellion.  The  truth  was 
that  the  North  had  to  make  its  army  before  it  could 
wisely  advance  into  the  assured  territory  of  the  South ; 
the  situation  of  the  Southern  Government  in  this 
respect  was  precisely  the  same.  The  North  had  enough 
to  do  meantime  in  making  sure  of  the  States  which 
were  still  debatable  ground.  Such  forces  as  were 
available  must  of  necessity  be  used  for  this  purpose,  but 


242  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

for  any  larger  operations  of  war  military  considerations, 
especially  on  the  side  which  had  the  larger  resources  at 
its  back,  were  in  favour  of  waiting  and  perfecting  the 
instrument  which  was  to  be  used.  But  in  the  course  of 
July  the  pressure  of  public  opinion  and  of  Congress, 
which  had  then  assembled,  overcame,  not  without  some 
reason,  the  more  cautious  military  view,  and  on  the 
2  ist  of  that  month  the  North  received  its  first  great 
lesson  in  adversity  at  the  battle  of  Bull  Run. 

Before  recounting  this  disaster  we  may  proceed  with 
the  story  of  the  struggle  in  the  border  States.  At  an 
early  date  the  rising  armies  of  the  North  had  been 
organised  into  three  commands,  called  the  Depart 
ment  of  the  Potomac,  on  the  front  between  Washing 
ton  and  Richmond,  the  Department  of  the  Ohio,  on 
the  upper  watershed  of  the  river  of  that  name,  and  the 
Department  of  the  West.  Of  necessity  the  generals 
commanding  in  these  two  more  Western  Departments 
exercised  a  larger  discretion  than  the  general  at 
Washington.  The  Department  of  the  Ohio  was  under 
General  McClellan,  before  the  war  a  captain  of  Engineers, 
who  had  retired  from  active  service  and  had  been 
engaged  as  a  railway  manager,  in  which  capacity  he  has 
already  been  noticed,  but  who  had  earned  a  good  name  in 
the  Mexican  War,  had  been  keen  enough  in  his  profession 
to  visit  the  Crimea,  and  was  esteemed  by  General  Scott. 
The  people  of  West  Virginia,  who,  as  has  been  said, 
were  trying  to  organise  themselves  as  a  new  State, 
adhering  to  the  Union,  were  invaded  by  forces  despatched 
by  the  Governor  of  their  old  State.  They  lay  mainly 
west  of  the  mountains,  and  help  could  reach  them  up 
tributary  valleys  of  the  Ohio.  They  appealed  to 
McClellan,  and  the  successes  quickly  won  by  forces 
despatched  by  him,  and  afterwards  under  his  direct  com 
mand,  secured  West  Virginia,  and  incidentally  the  repu 
tation  of  McClellan.  In  Kentucky,  further  west,  the 
Governor  endeavoured  to  hold  the  field  for  the  South  with 
a  body  known  as  the  State  Guard,  while  Unionist  leaders 
among  the  people  were  raising  volunteer  regiments  for 
the  North.  Nothing,  however,  was  determined  by. 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  243 

fighting  between  these  forces.  The  State  Legislature 
at  first  took  up  an  attitude  of  neutrality,  but  a  new 
Legislature,  elected  in  June,  was  overwhelmingly  for  the 
Union.  Ultimately  the  Confederate  armies  invaded 
Kentucky,  and  the  Legislature  thereupon  invited  the 
Union  armies  into  the  State  to  expel  them,  and  placed 
40,000  Kentucky  volunteers  at  the  disposal  of  the 
President.  Thenceforward,  though  Kentucky,  stretch 
ing  as  it  does  for  four  hundred  miles  between  the 
Mississippi  and  the  Alleghanies,  remained  for  long  a 
battle-ground,  the  allegiance  of  its  people  to  the  Union 
was  unshaken.  But  the  uncertainty  about  their  attitude 
continued  till  the  autumn  of  1861,  and  while  it  lasted 
was  an  important  element  in  Lincoln's  calculations. 
(It  must  be  remembered  that  slavery  existed  in  Ken 
tucky,  Maryland,  and  Missouri.)  In  Missouri  the  strife 
of  factions  was  fierce.  Already  in  January  there  had 
been  reports  of  a  conspiracy  to  seize  the  arsenal  at 
St.  Louis  for  the  South  when  the  time  came,  and  General 
Scott  had  placed  in  command  Captain  Nathaniel  Lyon, 
on  whose  loyalty  he  relied  the  more  because  he  was  an 
opponent  of  slavery.  The  Governor  was  in  favour  of 
the  South — as  was  also  the  Legislature,  and  the  Governor 
could  count  on  some  part  of  the  State  Militia ;  so 
Lincoln,  when  he  called  for  volunteers,  commissioned 
Lyon  to  raise  them  in  Missouri.  In  this  task  a  Union 
State  Committee  in  St.  Louis  greatly  helped  him,  and 
the  large  German  population  in  that  city  was  especially 
ready  to  enlist  for  the  Union.  Many  of  the  German 
immigrants  of  those  days  had  come  to  America  partly 
for  the  sake  of  its  free  institutions.  A  State  Convention 
was  summoned  by  the  Governor  to  pass  an  Ordinance 
of  Secession,  but  its  electors  were  minded  otherwise,  and 
the  Convention  voted  against  secession.  In  several 
encounters  Lyon,  who  was  an  intrepid  soldier,  defeated 
the  forces  of  the  Governor  ;  in  June  he  took  possession 
of  the  State  capital,  driving  the  Governor  and 
Legislature  away ;  the  State  Convention  then  again 
assembled  and  set  up  a  Unionist  Government  for  the 
State.  This  new  State  Government  was  not  everywhere 


244  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

acknowledged  ;  conspiracies  in  the  Southern  interest 
continued  to  exist  in  Missouri ;  and  the  State  was 
repeatedly  molested  by  invasions,  of  no  great  military 
consequence,  from  Arkansas.  Indeed,  in  the  autumn 
there  was  a  serious  recrudescence  of  trouble,  in  which 
Lyon  lost  his  life.  But  substantially  Missouri  was 
secured 'for  the  Union.  Naturally  enough,  a  great  many 
of  the  citizens  of  Missouri  who  had  combined  to  save 
their  State  to  the  Union  became  among  the  strongest  of 
the  "  Radicals  "  who  will  later  engage  our  attention. 
Many,  however,  of  the  leading  men  who  had  done  most 
in  this  cause,  including  the  friends  of  Blair,  Lincoln's 
Postmaster-General,  adhered  no  less  emphatically  to 
the  "  Conservative  "  section  of  the  Republicans. 

2.  Bull  Run. 

Thus,  in  the  autumn  of  1861,  North  and  South  had 
become  solidified  into  something  like  two  countries.  In 
the  month  of  July,  which  now  concerns  us,  this  process 
was  well  on  its  way,  but  it  is  to  be  marked  that  the  whole 
long  tract  of  Kentucky  still  formed  a  neutral  zone,  which 
the  Northern  Government  did  not  wish  to  harass,  and 
which  perhaps  the  South  would  have  done  well  to  let 
alone,  while  further  west  in  Missouri  the  forces  of  the 
North  were  not  even  as  fully  organised  as  in  the  East. 
So  the  only  possible  direction  in  which  any  great  blow 
could  be  struck  was  the  direction  of  Richmond,  now 
the  capital,  and  it  might  seem,  therefore,  the  heart, 
of  the  Confederacy.  The  Confederate  Congress  was 
to  meet  there  on  July  20.  The  New  York  Tribune, 
which  was  edited  by  Mr.  Horace  Greeley,  a  vigorous 
writer  whose  omniscience  was  unabated  by  the  variation 
of  his  own  opinion,  was  the  one  journal  of  far-reaching 
influence  in  the  North  ;  and  it  only  gave  exaggerated 
point  to  a  general  feeling  when  it  declared  that  the  Con 
federate  Congress  must  not  meet.  The  Senators  and 
Congressmen  now  in  Washington  were  not  quite  so 
exacting,  but  they  had  come  there  unanimous  in  their 
readiness  to  vote  taxes  and  support  the  war  in  every 
way,  and  they  wanted  to  see  something  done  ;  and  they 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  245 

wanted  it  all  the  more  because  the  three  months'  service 
of  the  militia  was  running  out.  General  Scott,  still  the 
chief  military  adviser  of  Government,  was  quite  distinct 
in  his  preference  for  waiting  and  for  perfecting  the 
discipline  and  organisation  of  the  volunteers,  who  had 
not  yet  even  been  formed  into  brigades.  On  the  militia 
he  set  no  value  at  all.  For  long  he  refused  to  counte 
nance  any  but  minor  movements  preparatory  to  a  later 
advance.  It  is  not  quite  certain,  however,  that  Congress 
and  public  opinion  were  wrong  in  clamouring  for  action. 
The  Southern  troops  were  not  much,  if  at  all,  more 
ready  for  use  than  the  Northerners  ;  and  Jefferson 
Davis  and  his  military  adviser,  Lee,  desired  time  for 
their  defensive  preparations.  It  was  perhaps  too  much 
to  expect  that  the  country  after  its  great  uprising  should 
be  content  to  give  supplies  and  men  without  end  while 
nothing  apparently  happened  ;  and  the  spirit  of  the 
troops  themselves  might  suffer  more  from  inaction 
than  from  defeat.  A  further  thought,  while  it  made 
defeat  seem  more  dangerous,  made  battle  more  tempting. 
There  was  fear  that  European  Powers  might  recognise 
the  Southern  Confederacy  and  enter  into  relations  with 
it.  Whether  they  did  so  depended  on  whether  they  were 
confirmed  in  their  growing  suspicion  that  the  North 
could  not  conquer  the  South.  Balancing  the  military 
advice  which  was  given  them  as  to  the  risk  against  this 
political  importunity,  Lincoln  and  his  Cabinet  chose  the 
risk,  and  Scott  at  length  withdrew  his  opposition. 
Lincoln  was  possibly  more  sensitive  to  pressure  than  he 
afterwards  became,  more  prone  to  treat  himself  as  a 
person  under  the  orders  of  the  people,  but  there  is  no 
reason  to  doubt  that  he  acted  on  his  own  sober  judgment 
as  well  as  that  of  his  Cabinet.  Whatever  degree  of 
confidence  he  reposed  in  Scott,  Scott  was  not  very 
insistent  ;  the  risk  was  not  overwhelming  ;  the  battle 
was  very  nearly  won,  would  have  been  won  if  the 
orders  of  Scott  had  been  carried  out.  No  very  great 
harm  in  fact  followed  the  defeat  of  Bull  Run  ;  and  the 
danger  of  inaction  was  real.  He  was  probably  then,  as 
he  certainly  was  afterwards,  profoundly  afraid  that  the 


246  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

excessive  military  caution  which  he  often  encountered 
would  destroy  the  cause  of  the  North  by  disheartening 
the  people  who  supported  the  war.  That  is  no  doubt  a 
kind  of  fear  to  which  many  statesmen  are  too  prone, 
but  Lincoln's  sense  of  real  popular  feeling  throughout 
the  wide  extent  of  the  North  is  agreed  to  have  been 
uncommonly  sure.  Definite  judgment  on  such  a  ques 
tion  is  impossible,  but  probably  Lincoln  and  his  Cabinet 
were  wise. 

However,  they  did  not  win  their  battle.  The  Southern 
army  under  Beauregard  lay  near  the  Bull  Run  river, 
some  twenty  miles  from  Washington,  covering  the 
railway  junction  of  Manassas  on  the  line  to  Richmond. 
The  main  Northern  army,  under  General  McDowell,  a 
capable  officer,  lay  south  of  the  Potomac,  where  fortifi 
cations  to  guard  Washington  had  already  been  erected 
on  Virginian  soil.  In  the  Shenandoah  Valley  was 
another  Southern  force,  under  Joseph  Johnston,  watched 
by  the  Northern  general  Patterson  at  Harper's  Ferry, 
which  had  been  recovered  by  Scott's  operations.  Each 
of  these  Northern  generals  was  in  superior  force  to  his 
opponent.  McDowell  was  to  attack  the  Confederate 
position  at  Manassas,  while  Patterson,  whose  numbers 
were  nearly  double  Johnston's,  was  to  keep  him  so 
seriously  occupied  that  he  could  not  join  Beauregard. 
With  whatever  excuse  of  misunderstanding  or  the  like, 
Patterson  made  hardly  an  attempt  to  carry  out  his  part 
of  Scott's  orders,  and  Johnston,  with  the  bulk  of  his 
force,  succeeded  in  joining  Beauregard  the  day  before 
McDowell's  attack,  and  without  his  gaining  knowledge  of 
this  movement.  The  battle  of  Bull  Run  or  Manassas 
(or  rather  the  earlier  and  more  famous  of  two  battles  so 
named)  was  an  engagement  of  untrained  troops  in  which 
up  to  a  certain  point  the  high  individual  quality  of  those 
troops  supplied  the  place  of  discipline.  McDowell 
handled  with  good  judgment  a  very  unhandy  instrument. 
It  was  only  since  his  advance  had  been  contemplated 
that  his  army  had  been  organised  in  brigades.  The 
enemy,  occupying  high  wooded  banks  on  the  south  side 
of  the  Bull  Run,  a  stream  about  as  broad  as  the  Thames 


THE   OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  247 

at  Oxford  but  fordable,  was  successfully  pushed  back 
to  a  high  ridge  beyond  ;  but  the  stubborn  attacks  over 
difficult  ground  upon  this  further  position  failed  from 
lack  of  co-ordination,  and,  when  it  already  seemed 
doubtful  whether  the  tired  soldiers  of  the  North  could 
renew  them  with  any  hope,  they  were  themselves 
attacked  on  their  right  flank.  It  seems  that  from  that 
moment  their  success  upon  that  day  was  really  hopeless, 
but  some  declare  that  the  Northern  soldiers  with  one 
accord  became  possessed  of  a  belief  that  this  flank 
attack  by  a  comparatively  small  body  was  that  of  the 
whole  force  of  Johnston,  freshly  arrived  upon  the  scene. 
In  any  case  they  spontaneously  retired  in  disorder  ; 
they  were  not  effectively  pursued,  but  McDowell  was 
unable  to  rally  them  at  Centreville,  a  mile  or  so  behind 
the  Bull  Run.  Among  the  camp  followers  the  panic 
became  extreme,  and  they  pressed  into  Washington  in 
wild  alarm,  accompanied  by  citizens  and  Congressmen 
who  had  come  out  to  see  a  victory,  and  who  left  one  or 
two  of  their  number  behind  as  prisoners  of  war.  The 
result  was  a  surprise  to  the  Southern  army.  Johnston, 
who  now  took  over  the  command,  declared  that  it  was 
as  much  disorganised  by  victory  as  the  Northern  army 
by  defeat.  With  the  full  approval  of  his  superiors  in 
Richmond,  he  devoted  himself  to  entrenching  his  position 
at  Manassas.  But  in  Washington,  where  rumours  of 
victory  had  been  arriving  all  through  the  day  of  battle, 
there  prevailed  for  some  time  an  impression  that  the 
city  was  exposed  to  immediate  capture,  and  this  im 
pression  was  shared  by  McClellan,  to  whom  universal 
opinion  now  turned  as  the  appointed  saviour,  and  who 
was  forthwith  summoned  to  Washington  to  take 
command  of  the  army  of  the  Potomac. 

Within  the  circle  of  the  Administration  there  was, 
of  course,  deep  mortification.  Old  General  Scott 
passionately  declared  himself  to  have  been  the 
greatest  coward  in  America  in  having  ever  given  way 
to  the  President's  desire  for  action.  Lincoln,  who  was 
often  to  prove  his  readiness  to  take  blame  on  his  own 
shoulders,  evidently  thought  that  the  responsibility  in 


248  ABRAHAM,  LINCOLN 

this  case  was  shared  by  Scott,  and  demanded  to  know 
whether  Scott  accused  him  of  having  overborne  his 
judgment.  The  old  general  warmly,  if  a  little  am 
biguously,  replied  that  he  had  served  under  many 
Presidents,  but  never  known  a  kinder  master.  Plainly 
he  felt  that  his  better  judgment  had  somehow  been 
overpowered,  and  yet  that  there  was  nothing  in  their 
relations  for  which  in  his  heart  he  could  blame  the 
President ;  and  this  trivial  dialogue  is  worth  remem 
bering  during  the  dreary  and  controversial  tale  of 
Lincoln's  relations  with  Scott's  successor.  Lincoln, 
however  bitterly  disappointed,  showed  no  signs  of 
discomposure  or  hesitancy.  The  business  of  making 
the  army  of  the  Potomac  quietly  began  over  again. 
To  the  four  days  after  Bull  Run  belongs  one  of  the  few 
records  of  the  visits  to  the  troops  which  Lincoln  con 
stantly  paid  when  they  were  not  too  far  from  Washing 
ton,  cheering  them  with  little  talks  which  served  a 
good  purpose  without  being  notable.  He  was  reviewing 
the  brigade  commanded  at  Bull  Run  by  William  Sherman, 
later,  but  not  yet,  one  of  the  great  figures  in  the  war. 
He  was  open  to  all  complaints,  and  a  colonel  of  militia 
came  to  him  with  a  grievance  ;  he  claimed  that  his  term 
of  service  had  already  expired,  that  he  had  intended  to 
go  home,  but  that  Sherman  unlawfully  threatened  to 
shoot  him  if  he  did  so.  Lincoln  had  a  good  look  at 
Sherman,  and  then  advised  the  colonel  to  keep  out  of 
Sherman's  way,  as  he  looked  like  a  man  of  his  word. 
This  was  said  in  the  hearing  of  many  men,  and  Sherman 
records  his  lively  gratitude  for  a  simple  jest  which 
helped  him  greatly  in  keeping  his  brigade  in  existence. 
Not  one  of  the  much  more  serious  defeats  suffered 
later  in  the  war  produced  by  itself  so  lively  a  sense  of 
discomfiture  in  the  North  as  this  ;  thus  none  will 
equally  claim  our  attention.  But,  except  for  the  first 
false  alarms  in  Washington,  there  was  no  disposition  to 
mistake  its  military  significance.  The  "  second  uprising 
of  the  North,"  which  followed  upon  this  bracing  shock, 
left  as  vivid  a  memory  as  the  little  disaster  of  Bull  Run. 
But  there  was  of  necessity  a  long  pause  while  McClellan 


THE  OPENING    OF  THE  WAR  249 

remodelled  the  army  in  the  East,  and  the  situation  in 
the  West  was  becoming  ripe  for  important  movements. 
The  eagerness  of  the  Northern  people  to  make  some 
progress  again  asserted  itself  before  long,  but  to  their 
surprise,  and  perhaps  to  that  of  a  reader  to-day,  the 
last  five  months  of  1861  passed  without  notable  military 
events.  Here  then  we  may  turn  to  the  progress  of 
other  affairs,  departmental  affairs,  foreign  affairs,  and 
domestic  policy,  which,  it  must  not  be  forgotten,  had 
pressed  heavily  upon  the  Administration  from  the 
moment  that  war  began. 

3.  Lincoln* s  Administration  generally. 
Long  before  the  Eastern  public  was  very  keenly 
aware  of  Lincoln  the  members  of  his  Cabinet  had  come 
to  think  of  the  Administration  as  his  Administration,1 
some,  like  Seward,  of  whom  it  could  have  been  little 
expected,  with  a  loyal,  and  for  America  most  fortunate, 
acceptance  of  real  subordination,  and  one  at  least, 
Chase,  with  indignant  surprise  that  his  own  really 
great  abilities  were  not  dominant.  One  Minister  early 
told  his  friends  that  there  was  but  one  vote  in  the 
Cabinet,  the  President's.  This  must  not  be  taken  in 
the  sense  that  Lincoln's  personal  guidance  was  present 
in  every  department.  He  had  his  own  department, 
concerned  with  the  maintenance  of  Northern  unity  and 
with  that  great  underlying  problem  of  internal  policy 
which  will  before  long  appear  again,  and  the  business  of 
the  War  Department  was  so  immediately  vital  as  to 
require  his  ceaseless  attention  ;  but  in  other  matters  the 
degree  and  manner  of  his  control  of  course  varied. 
Again,  it  is  far  from  being  the  case  that  the  Cabinet  had  i 
little  influence  on  his  action.  He  not  only  consulted  it 
much,  but  deferred  to  it  much.  His  wisdom  seems  to 
have  shown  itself  in  nothing  more  strongly  than  in 
recognising  when  he  wanted  advice  and  when  he  did/ 
not,  when  he  needed  support  and  when  he  could  stand  \ 
alone.  Sometimes  he  yielded  to  his  Ministers  because 
he  valued  their  judgment,  sometimes  also  because  he 
gauged  by  them  the  public  support  without  which  his 


25o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

action  must  fail.  Sometimes,  when  he  was  sure  of  the 
necessity,  he  took  grave  steps  without  advice  from  them 
or  any  one.  More  often  he  tried  to  arrive  with  them  at 
a  real  community  of  decision.  It  is  often  impossible  to 
guess  what  acts  of  an  Administration  are  rightly  credited 
to  its  chief.  The  hidden  merit  or  demerit  of  many 
statesmen  has  constantly  lain  in  the  power,  or  the  lack 
of  it,  of  guiding  their  colleagues  and  being  guided  in 
turn.  If  we  tried  to  be  exact  in  saying  Lincoln,  or 
Lincoln's  Cabinet,  or  the  North  did  this  or  that,  it  would 
be  necessary  to  thresh  out  many  bushels  of  tittle-tattle. 
The  broad  impression,  however,  remains  that  in  the 
many  things  in  which  Lincoln  did  not  directly  rule  he 
ruled  through  a  group  of  capable  men  of  whom  he  made 
the  best  use,  and  whom  no  other  chief  could  have 
induced  to  serve  so  long  in  concord.  As  we  proceed 
some  authentic  examples  of  his  precise  relations  with 
them  will  appear,  in  which,  unimportant  as  they 
seem,  one  test  of  his  quality  as  a  statesman  and  of  his 
character  should  be  sought. 

The  naval  operations  of  the  war  afford  many  tales  of 
daring  on  both  sides  which  cannot  here  be  noticed. 
They  afford  incidents  of  strange  interest  now,  such  as 
the  exploit  of  the  first  submarine.  (It  belonged  to  the 
South  ;  its  submersion  invariably  resulted  in  the  death 
of  the  whole  crew  ;  and,  with  full  knowledge  of  this,  a 
devoted  crew  went  down  and  destroyed  a  valuable 
Northern  ironclad.)  The  ravages  on  commerce  of  the 
Alabama  and  some  other  Southern  cruisers  became  only 
too  famous  in  England,  from  whose  ship-building  yards 
they  had  escaped.  The  North  failed  too  in  some  out 
of  the  fairly  numerous  combined  naval  and  military 
expeditions,  which  were  undertaken  with  a  view  to 
making  the  blockade  more  complete  and  less  arduous 
by  the  occupation  of  Southern  ports,  and  perhaps  to 
more  serious  incursions  into  the  South.  Among  those 
of  them  which  will  require  no  special  notice,  most 
succeeded.  Thus  by  the  spring  of  1863  Florida  was 
substantially  in  Northern  hands,  and  by  1865  the  South 
had  but  two  ports  left,  Charleston  and  Wilmington  ; 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  251 

but  the  venture  most  attractive  to  Northern  sentiment, 
an  attack  upon  Charleston  itself,  proved  a  mere  waste  of 
military  force.  Moreover,  till  a  strong  military  adviser 
was  at  last  found  in  Grant  there  was  some  dissipation 
of  military  force  in  such  expeditions.  Nevertheless, 
the  naval  success  of  the  North  was  so  continuous  and 
overwhelming  that  its  history  in  detail  need  not  be 
recounted  in  these  pages.  Almost  from  the  first  the 
ever-tightening  grip  of  the  blockade  upon  the  Southern 
coasts  made  its  power  felt,  and  early  in  1862  the  inland 
waterways  of  the  South  were  beginning  to  fall  under 
the  command  of  the  Northern  flotillas.  Such  a  success 
needed,  of  course,  the  adoption  of  a  decided  policy  from 
the  outset  ;  it  needed  great  administrative  ability  to 
improvise  a  navy  where  hardly  any  existed,  and  where 
the  conditions  of  its  employment  were  in  many  respects 
novel ;  and  it  needed  resourceful  watching  to  meet  the 
surprises  of  fresh  naval  invention  by  which  the  South, 
poor  as  were  its  possibilities  for  ship-building,  might 
have  rendered  impotent,  as  once  or  twice  it  seemed 
likely  to  do,  the  Northern  blockade.  Gideon  Welles, 
the  responsible  Cabinet  Minister,  was  constant  and  would 
appear  to  have  been  capable  at  his  task,  but  the  inspiring 
mind  of  the  Naval  Department  was  found  in  Gustavus 
V.  Fox,  a  retired  naval  officer,  who  at  the  beginning  of 
Lincoln's  administration  was  appointed  Assistant  Secre 
tary  of  the  Navy.  The  policy  of  blockade  was  begun 
by  Lincoln's  Proclamation  on  April  19,  1861.  It  was 
a  hardy  measure,  certain  to  be  a  cause  of  friction  with 
foreign  Powers.  The  United  States  Government  had 
contended  in  1812  that  a  blockade  which  is  to  confer 
any  rights  against  neutral  commerce  must  be  an  effective 
blockade,  and  has  not  lately  been  inclined  to  take  lax 
views  upon  such  questions  ;  but  when  it  declared  its 
blockade  of  the  South  it  possessed  only  three  steamships 
of  war  with  which  to  make  it  effective.  But  the  policy 
was  stoutly  maintained.  The  Naval  Department  at 
the  very  first  set  about  buying  merchant  ships  in 
Northern  ports  and  adapting  them  to  warlike  use,  and 
building  ships  of  its  own,  in  the  design  of  which  it 


252  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

shortly  obtained  the  help  of  a  Commission  of  Congress 
on  the  subject  of  ironclads.  The  Naval  Department 
had  at  least  the  fullest  support  and  encouragement 
from  Lincoln  in  the  whole  of  its  policy.  Everything 
goes  to  show  that  he  followed  naval  affairs  carefully, 
but  that,  as  he  found  them  conducted  on  sound  lines 
by  men  that  he  trusted,  his  intervention  in  them  was  of 
a  modest  kind.  Welles  continued  throughout  the 
member  of  his  Cabinet  with  whom  he  had  the  least 
friction,  and  was  probably  one  of  those  Ministers,  common 
in  England,  who  earn  the  confidence  of  their  own 
departments  without  in  any  way  impressing  the 
imagination  of  the  public  ;  and  a  letter  by  Lincoln  to 
Fox  immediately  after  the  affair  of  Fort  Sumter  shows 
the  hearty  esteem  and  confidence  with  which  from  the 
first  he  regarded  Fox.  Of  the  few  slight  records  of  his 
judgment  in  these  matters  one  is  significant.  The 
unfortunate  expedition  against  Charleston  in  the  spring 
of  1863  was  undertaken  with  high  hopes  by  the  Naval 
Department ;  but  Lincoln,  we  happen  to  know,  never 
believed  it  could  succeed.  He  has,  rightly  or  wrongly, 
been  blamed  for  dealings  with  his  military  officers  in 
which  he  may  be  said  to  have  spurred  them  hard  ;  he 
cannot  reasonably  be  blamed  for  giving  the  rein  to  his 
expert  subordinates,  because  his  own  judgment,  which 
differed  from  theirs,  turned  out  right.  This  is  one  of 
very  many  instances  which  suggest  that  at  the  time 
when  his  confidence  in  himself  was  full  grown  his 
disposition,  if  any,  to  interfere  was  well  under  control. 
It  is  also  one  of  the  indications  that  his  attention  was 
alert  in  many  matters  in  which  his  hand  was  not  seen. 

He  was  no  financier,  and  that  important  part  of  the 
history  of  the  war,  Northern  finance,  concerns  us  little. 
The  real  economic  strength  of  the  North  was  immense, 
for  immigration  and  development  were  going  on  so 
fast,  that,  for  all  the  strain  of  the  war,  production 
and  exports  increased.  But  the  superficial  disturbance 
caused  by  borrowing  and  the  issue  of  paper  money  were 
great,  and,  though  the  North  never  bore  the  pinching 
that  was  endured  in  the  South,  it  is  an  honourable  thing 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  253 

that,  for  all  the  rise  in  the  cost  of  living  and  for  all  the 
trouble  that  occurred  in  business  when  the  premium 
on  gold  often  fluctuated  between  40  and  60  and  on 
one  occasion  rose  to  185,  neither  the  solid  working  class 
of  the  country  generally  nor  the  solid  business  class 
of  New  York  were  deeply  affected  by  the  grumbling  at 
the  duration  of  the  war.  The  American  verdict  upon 
the  financial  policy  of  Chase,  a  man  of  intellect  but  new 
to  such  affairs,  is  one  of  high  praise.  Lincoln  left  him 
free  in  that  policy.  He  had  watched  the  acts  and 
utterances  of  his  chief  contemporaries  closely  and  early 
acquired  a  firm  belief  in  Chase's  ability.  How  much 
praise  is  due  to  the  President,  who  for  this  reason  kept 
Chase  in  his  Cabinet,  a  later  part  of  this  story  may 
show. 

One  function  of  Government  was  that  of  the  President 
alone.  An  English  statesman  is  alleged  to  have  said 
upon  becoming  Prime  Minister,  "  I  had  important  and 
interesting  business  in  my  old  office,  but  now  my  chief 
duty  will  be  to  create  undeserving  Peers."  Lincoln, 
in  the  anxious  days  that  followed  his  first  inauguration, 
once  looked  especially  harassed;  a  Senator  said  to 
him  :  "  What  is  the  matter,  Mr.  President  ?  Is  there 
bad  news  from  Fort  Sumter  ?  "  "  Oh,  no,"  he  answered, 
"  it's  the  Post  Office  at  Baldinsville."  The  patronage 
of  the  President  was  enormous,  including  the  most 
trifling  offices  under  Government,  such  as  village 
postmasterships.  In  the  appointment  to  local  offices, 
he  was  expected  to  consult  the  local  Senators  and 
Representatives  of  his  own  party,  and  of  course  to 
choose  men  who  had  worked  for  the  party.  In  the  vast 
majority  of  cases  decent  competence  for  the  office  in 
the  people  so  recommended  might  be  presumed.  The 
established  practice  further  required  that  a  Republican 
President  on  coming  in  should  replace  with  good 
Republicans  most  of  the  nominees  of  the  late  Democratic 
administration,  which  had  done  the  like  in  its  day. 
Lincoln's  experience  after  a  while  led  him  to  prophesy 
that  the  prevalence  of  office-seeking  would  be  the  ruin 
of  American  politics,  but  it  certainly  never  occurred  to 


254  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

him  to  try  and  break  down  then  the  accepted  rule,  of 
which  no  party  yet  complained.  It  would  have  been 
unmeasured  folly,  even  if  he  had  thought  of  it,  to  have 
taken  during  such  a  crisis  a  new  departure  which  would 
have  vexed  the  Republicans  far  more  than  it  would 
have  pleased  the  Democrats.  And  at  that  time  it  was 
really  of  great  consequence  that  public  officials  should 
be  men  of  known  loyalty  to  the  Union,  for  obviously  a 
postmaster  of  doubtful  loyalty  might  do  mischief. 
Lincoln,  then,  except  in  dealing  with  posts  of  special 
consequence,  for  which  men  with  really  special  qualifi 
cations  were  to  be  found,  frankly  and  without  a  question 
took  as  the  great  principle  of  his  patronage  the  fairest 
possible  distribution  of  favours  among  different  classes 
and  individuals  among  the  supporters  of  the  Government, 
whom  it  was  his  primary  duty  to  keep  together.  His 
attitude  in  the  whole  business  was  perfectly  understood 
and  respected  by  scrupulous  men  who  watched  politics 
critically.  It  was  the  cause  in  one  way  of  great  worry 
to  him,  for,  except  when  his  indignation  was  kindled, 
he  was  abnormally  reluctant  to  say  "  no," — he  once 
shuddered  to  think  what  would  have  happened  to  him 
if  he  had  been  a  woman,  but  was  consoled  by  the 
thought  that  his  ugliness  would  have  been  a  shield ; 
and  his  private  secretaries  accuse  him  6f  carrying  out 
his  principle  with  needless  and  even  ridiculous  care. 
In  appointments  to  which  the  party  principle  did  not 
apply,  but  in  which  an  ordinary  man  would  have  felt 
party  prejudice,  Lincoln's  old  opponents  were  often 
startled  by  his  freedom  from  it.  If  jobbery  be  the 
right  name  for  his  persistent  endeavour  to  keep  the 
partisans  of  the  Union  pleased  and  united,  his  jobbery 
proved  to  have  one  shining  attribute  of  virtue  ;  later 
on,  when,  apart  from  the  Democratic  opposition  which 
revived,  there  arose  in  the  Republican  party  sections 
hostile  to  himself,  the  claims  of  personal  adherence  to 
him  and  the  wavering  prospects  of  his  own  re-election 
seem,  from  recorded  instances,  to  have  affected  his 
choice  remarkably  little. 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  255 

4.  Foreign  Policy  and  England. 

The  question,  what  was  his  influence  upon  foreign 
policy,  is  more  difficult  than  the  general  praise  bestowed 
upon  it  might  lead  us  to  expect ;  because,  though  he  is 
known  to  have  exercised  a  constant  supervision  over 
Seward,  that  influence  was  concealed  from  the  diplomatic 
world. 

For  at  least  the  first  eighteen  months  of  the  war, 
apart  from  lesser  points  of  quarrel,  a  real  danger  of 
foreign  intervention  hung  over  the  North.  The  danger 
was  increased  by  the  ambitions  of  Napoleon  III.  in 
regard  to  Mexico,  and  by  the  loss  and  suffering  caused 
to  England,  above  all,  not  merely  from  the  interruption 
of  trade  but  from  the  suspension  of  cotton  supplies  by 
the  blockade.  From  the  first  there  was  the  fear  that 
foreign  powers  would  recognise  the  Southern  Confederacy 
as  an  independent  country  ;  that  they  were  then  likely 
to  offer  mediation  which  it  would  at  the  best  have  been 
embarrassing  for  the  President  to  reject ;  that  they 
might  ultimately,  when  their  mediation  had  been 
rejected,  be  tempted  to  active  intervention.  It  is 
curious  that  the  one  European  Government  which  was 
recognised  all  along  as  friendly  to  the  Republic  was  that 
of  the  Czar,  Alexander  II.  of  Russia,  who  in  this  same 
year,  1861,  was  accomplishing  the  project,  bequeathed 
to  him  by  his  father,  of  emancipating  the  serfs.  Mercier, 
the  French  Minister  in  Washington,  advised  his  Govern 
ment  to  recognise  the  South  Confederacy  as  early  as 
March  1861.  The  Emperor  of  the  French,  though  not 
the  French  people,  inclined  throughout  to  this  policy; 
but  he  would  not  act  apart  from  England,  and  the  English 
Government,  though  Americans  did  not  know  it,  had 
determined,  and  for  the  present  was  quite  resolute,  against 
any  hasty  action.  Nevertheless  an  almost  accidental 
cause  very  soon  brought  England  and  the  North  within 
sight  of  a  war  from  which  neither  people  was  in 
appearance  averse. 

Neither  the  foreign  policy  of  Lincoln's  Government 
nor,  indeed,  the  relations  of  England  and  America  from 


256  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

his  day  to  our  own  can  be  understood  without  some 
study  of  the  attitude  of  the  two  countries  to  each  other 
during  the  war.  If  we  could  put  aside  any  previous 
judgment  on  the  cause  as  between  North  and  South, 
there  are  still  some  marked  features  in  the  attitude  of 
England  during  the  war  which  every  Englishman  must 
now  regret.  It  should  emphatically  be  added  that 
there  were  some  upon  which  every  Englishman  should 
look  back  with  satisfaction.  Many  of  the  expressions 
of  English  opinion  at  that  time  betray  a  powerlessness 
to  comprehend  another  country  and  a  self-sufficiency 
in  judging  it,  which,  it  may  humbly  be  claimed,  were  not 
always  and  are  not  now  so  characteristic  of  Englishmen 
as  they  were  in  that  period  of  our  history,  in  many 
ways  so  noble,  which  we  associate  with  the  rival 
influences  of  Palmerston  and  of  Cobden.  It  is  not  at 
all  surprising  that  ordinary  English  gentlemen  started 
with  a  leaning  towards  the  South  ;  they  liked  Southerners 
and  there  was  much  in  the  manners  of  the  North,  and 
in  the  experiences  of  Englishmen  trading  with  or 
investing  in  the  North,  which  did  not  impress  them 
favourably.  Many  Northerners  discovered  something 
snobbish  and  unsound  in  this  preference,  but  they  were 
not  quite  right.  With  this  leaning,  Englishmen  readily 
accepted  the  plea  of  the  South  that  it  was  threatened 
with  intolerable  interference  ;  indeed  to  this  day  it  is 
hardly  credible  to  Englishmen  that  the  grievance 
against  which  the  South  arose  in  such  passionate  revolt 
was  so  unsubstantial  as  it  really  was.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  case  of  the  North  was  not  apprehended.  How 
it  came  to  pass,  in  the  intricate  and  usually  uninteresting 
play  of  American  politics,  that  a  business  community, 
which  had  seemed  pretty  tolerant  of  slavery,  was  now  at 
war  on  some  point  which  was  said  to  be  and  said  not  to 
be  slavery,  was  a  little  hard  to  understand.  Those  of  us 
who  remember  our  parents'  talk  of  the  American  Civil 
War  did  not  hear  from  them  the  true  and  fairly  simple 
explanation  of  the  war,  that  the  North  fought  because  it 
refused  to  connive  further  in  the  extension  of  slavery, 
and  would  not — could  not  decently — accept  the  dis- 


THE   OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  257 

ruption  of  a  great  country  as  the  alternative.  It  is 
strictly  true  that  the  chivalrous  South  rose  in  blind 
passion  for  a  cause  at  the  bottom  of  which  lay  the 
narrowest  of  pecuniary  interests,  while  the  over-sharp 
Yankees,  guided  by  a  sort  of  comic  backwoodsman, 
fought,  whether  wisely  or  not,  for  a  cause  as  untainted  as 
ever  animated  a  nation  in  arms.  But  it  seems  a  paradox 
even  now,  and  there  is  no  reproach  in  the  fact,  that  our 
fathers,  who  had  not  followed  the  vacillating  course  of 
Northern  politics  hitherto,  did  not  generally  take  it  in. 
We  shall  see  in  a  later  chapter  how  Northern  statesman 
ship  added  to  their  perplexity.  But  it  is  impossible  not 
to  be  ashamed  of  some  ol:  the  forms  in  which  English 
feeling  showed  itself  and  was  well  known  in  the  North 
to  show  itself.  Not  only  the  articles  of  some  English 
newspapers,  but  the  private  letters  of  Americans  who 
then  found  themselves  in  the  politest  circles  in  London, 
are  unpleasant  to  read  now.  It  is  painful,  too,  that  a 
leader  of  political  thought  like  Cobden  should  even  for 
a  little  while — and  it  was  only  a  little  while — have  been 
swayed  in  such  a  matter  by  a  sympathy  relatively  so 
petty  as  agreement  with  the  Southern  doctrine  of  Free 
Trade.  We  might  now  call  it  worthier  of  Prussia  than 
of  England  that  a  great  Englishman  like  Lord  Salisbury 
(then  Lord  Robert  Cecil)  should  have  expressed  friend 
ship  for  the  South  as  a  good  customer  of  ours,  and 
antagonism  for  the  North  as  a  rival  in  our  business. 
When  such  men  as  these  said  such  things  they  were,  of 
course,  not  brutally  indifferent  to  right,  they  were 
merely  blind  to  the  fact  that  a  very  great  and  plain 
issue  of  right  and  wrong  was  really  involved  in  the  war. 
Gladstone,  to  take  another  instance,  was  not  blind  to 
that,  but  with  irritating  misapprehension  he  protested 
against  the  madness  of  plunging  into  war  to  propagate 
the  cause  of  emancipation.  Then  came  in  his  love  of 
small  states,  and  from  his  mouth,  while  he  was  a  Cabinet 
Minister,  came  the  impulsive  pronouncement,  bitterly 
regretted  by  him  and  bitterly  resented  in  the  North  : 
"  Jefferson  Davis  and  other  leaders  of  the  South  have 
made  an  army  ;  they  are  making,  it/appears.  a  navy  ; 


258  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

and  they  have  made — what  is  more  than  either — they 
have  made  a  nation."  Many  other  Englishmen  simply 
sympathised  with  the  weaker  side  ;  many  too,  it  should 
be  confessed,  with  the  apparently  weaker  side  which 
they  were  really  persuaded  would  win.  ("  Win  the 
battles,"  said  Lord  Robert  Cecil  to  a  Northern  lady, 
"  and  we  Tories  shall  come  round  at  once.")  These 
things  are  recalled  because  their  natural  effect  in 
America  has  to  be  understood.  What  is  really  lament 
able  is  not  that  in  this  distant  and  debatable  affair 
the  sympathy  of  so  many  inclined  to  the  South,  but 
that,  when  at  least  there  was  a  Northern  side,  theref 
seemed  at  first  to  be  hardly  any  capable  of  understanding^ 
or  being  stirred  by  it.  Apart  from  politicians  there] 
were  only  two  Englishmen  of  the  first  rank,  Tennyson* 
and  Darwin,  who,  whether  or  not  they  understood  the 
matter  in  detail,  are  known  to  have  cared  from  their 
hearts  for  the  Northern  cause.  It  is  pleasant  to  associate 
with  these  greater  names  that  of  the  author  of  "  Tom 
Brown."  The  names  of  those  hostile  to  the  North  or 
apparently  quite  uninterested  are  numerous  and  sur 
prising.  Even  Dickens,  who  had  hated  slavery,  and 
who  in  "  Martin  Chuzzlewit "  had  appealed  however 
bitterly  to  the  higher  national  spirit  which  he  thought 
latent  in  America,  now,  when  that  spirit  had  at  last  and 
in  deed  asserted  itself,  gave  way  in  his  letters  to  nothing 
but  hatred  of  the  whole  country.  And  a  disposition  like 
this — explicable  but  odious — did  no  doubt  exist  in  the 
England  of  those  days. 

There  is,  however,  quite  another  aspect  of  this 
question  besides  that  which  has  so  painfully  impressed 
many  American  memories.  When  the  largest  manufac 
turing  industry  of  England  was  brought  near  to  famine 
by  the  blockade,  the  voice  of  the  stricken  working 
population  was  loudly  and  persistently  uttered  on  the 
side  of  the  North.  There  has  been  no  other  demon 
stration  so  splendid  of  the  spirit  which  remains  widely 
diffused  among  individual  English  working  men  and 
which  at  one  time  animated  labour  as  a  concentrated 
political  force.  John  Bright,  who  completely  grasped 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE   WAR  259 

the  situation  in  America,  took  a  stand,  in  which.  J.  S. 
Mill,  W.  E.  Forster,  and  the  Duke  of  Argyll  share  his 
credit,  but  which  did  peculiar  and  great  honour  to  him 
as  a  Quaker  who  hated  war.     But  there  is  something 
more  that  must  be  said.     The  conduct  of  the  English 
Government,  supported  by  the  responsible  leaders    of 
the  Opposition,  was  at  that  time,  no  less  than  now,  the 
surest  indication  of  the  more  deep-seated  feelings  of  the 
real  bulk  of  Englishmen  on  any  great  question  affecting 
our  international  relations  ;    and  the   attitude   of  the 
Government,    in   which    Lord    Palmerston    was    Prime 
Minister    and    Lord    John    Russell    Foreign    Secretary, 
and  with  which  in   this   matter   Conservative   leaders 
like  Disraeli  and  Sir  Stafford  Northcote  entirely  con 
curred,  was  at  the  very  least  free  from  grave  reproach. 
Lord  John  Russell,  and,  there  can  be  little  doubt,  his 
colleagues  generally,  regarded  slavery  as  an  "  accursed 
institution,"  but  they  felt  no  anger  with  the  people  of 
the  South  for  it,  because,  as  he  said,  "  we  gave  them 
that  curse  and  ours  were  the  hands  from  which  they 
received  that  fatal  gift  "  ;    in  Lord  John  at  least  the 
one  overmastering  sentiment  upon  the  outbreak  of  the 
war  was  that  of  sheer  pain  that  "  a  great  Republic, 
which  has  enjoyed  institutions  under  which  the  people 
have    been    free    and   happy,    is    placed   in   jeopardy." 
Their  insight  into  American  affairs  did  not  go  deep  ; 
but  the  more  seriously  we  rate  "  the  strong  antipathy 
to  the  North,   the   strong  sympathy  with  the   South, 
and  the  passionate  wish  to  have  cotton,"  of  which  a 
Minister,  Lord  Granville,  wrote  at  the  time,  the  greater 
is  the  credit  due  both  to  the  Government  as  a  whole 
and  to  Disraeli  for  having  been  conspicuously  unmoved 
by  these  considerations  ;  and  "  the  general  approval  from 
Parliament,  the  press,  and  the  public,"  which,  as  Lord 
Granville  added,  their  policy  received,  is  creditable  too. 
It  is  perfectly  true,  as  will  be  seen  later,  that  at  one 
dark  moment  in  the  fortunes  of  the  North,  the  Govern 
ment  very  cautiously  considered  the  possibility  of  inter 
vention.     But  Disraeli,  to  whom  a  less  patriotic  course 
would   have   offered    a    party   advantage,   recalled    to 


26o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

them  their  own  better  judgment;  and  it  is  .impos 
sible  to  read  their  correspondence  on  this  question 
without  perceiving  that  in  this  they  were  actuated  by 
no  hostility  to  the  North,  but  by  a  sincere  belief  that 
the  cause  of  the  North  was  hopeless  and  that  inter 
vention,  with  a  view  to  stopping  bloodshed,  might  prove 
the  course  of  honest  friendship  to  all  America.  English 
men  of  a  later  time  have  become  deeply  interested  in 
America,  and  may  wish  that  their  fathers  had  better 
understood  the  great  issue  of  the  Civil  War,  but  it  is 
matter  for  pride,  which  in  honesty  should  be  here 
asserted,  that  with  many  selfish  interests  in  this  contest, 
of  which  they  were  most  keenly  aware,  Englishmen,  in 
their  capacity  as  a  nation,  acted  with  complete 
integrity. 

But  for  our  immediate  purpose  the  object  of  thus 
reviewing  a  subject  on  which  American  historians  have 
lavished  much  research  is  to  explain  the  effect  produced 
in  America  by  demonstrations  of  strong  antipathy  and 
sympathy  in  England.  The  effect  in  some  ways  has 
been  long  lasting.  The  South  caught  at  every  mark  of 
sympathy  with  avidity,  was  led  by  its  politicians  to 
expect  help,  received  none,  and  became  resentful.  It 
is  surprising  to  be  told,  but  may  be  true,  that  the 
embers  of  this  resentment  became  dangerous  to  England 
in  the  autumn  of  1914.  In  the  North  the  memory  of 
an  antipathy  which  was  almost  instantly  perceived  has 
burnt  deep,  as  many  memoirs,  for  instance  those  recently 
published  by  Senator  Lodge,  show,  into  the  minds  of  pre 
cisely  those  Americans  to  whom  Englishmen  have  ever 
since  been  the  readiest  to  accord  their  esteem.  There 
were  many  men  in  the  North  with  a  ready-made  dislike  of 
England,  but  there  were  many  also  whose  sensitiveness 
to  English  opinion,  if  in  some  ways  difficult  for  us  to 
appreciate,  was  intense.  Republicans  such  as  James 
Russell  Lowell  had  writhed  under  the  reproaches  cast 
by  Englishmen  upon  the  acquiescence  of  all  America  in 
slavery  ;  they  felt  that  the  North  had  suddenly  cut 
off  this  reproach  and  staked  everything  on  the  refusal 
to  give  way  to  slavery  any  further  ;  they  looked  now 


THE   OPENING  OF  THE   WAR  261 

for  expressions  of  sympathy  from  many  quarters  in 
England  ;  but  in  the  English  newspapers  which  they 
read  and  the  reports  of  Americans  in  England  they  found 
evidence  of  nothing  but  dislike.  There  soon  came 
evidence,  as  it  seemed  to  the  whole  North,  of  actually 
hostile  action  on  the  part  of  the  British  Government. 
It  issued  a  Proclamation  enjoining  neutrality  upon 
British  subjects.  This  was  a  matter  of  course  on  the 
outbreak  of  what  was  nothing  less  than  war ;  but 
Northerners  thought  that  at  least  some  courteous 
explanation  should  first  have  been  made  to  their 
Government,  and  there  were  other  matters  which  they 
misinterpreted  as  signs  of  an  agreement  of  England  with 
France  to  go  further  and  open  diplomatic  relations  with 
the  Confederate  Government.  Thus  alike  in  the  most 
prejudiced  and  in  the  most  enlightened  quarters  in  the 
North  there  arose  an  irritation  which  an  Englishman 
must  see  to  have  been  natural  but  can  hardly  think  to 
have  been  warranted  by  the  real  facts. 

Here  came  in  the  one  clearly  known  and  most 
certainly  happy  intervention  of  Lincoln's  in  foreign 
affairs.  Early  in  May  Seward  brought  to  him  the  draft 
of  a  vehement  despatch,  telling  the  British  Government 
peremptorily  what  the  United  States  would  not  stand, 
and  framed  in  a  manner  which  must  have  frustrated  any 
attempt  by  Adams  in  London  to  establish  good  relations 
with  Lord  John  Russell.  That  draft  now  exists  with 
the  alterations  made  in  Lincoln's  own  hand.  With  a 
few  touches,  some  of  them  very  minute,  made  with  the 
skill  of  a  master  of  language  and  of  a  life-long  peace 
maker,  he  changed  the  draft  into  a  firm  but  entirely 
courteous  despatch.  In  particular,  instead  of  requiring 
Adams,  as  Seward  would  have  done,  to  read  the  whole 
despatch  to  Russell  and  leave  him  with  a  copy  of  it, 
he  left  it  to  the  man  on  the  spot  to  convey  its  sense  in 
what  manner  he  judged  best.  Probably,  as  has  been 
claimed  for  him,  his  few  penstrokes  made  peaceful 
relations  easy  when  Seward's  despatch  would  have  made 
them  almost  impossible ;  certainly  a  study  of  this 
document  will  prove  both  his  strange,  untutored  diplo- 


262  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

matic   skill   and    the  general  soundness  of  his  view  of 
foreign  affairs. 

(Now,  however,  followed  a  graver  crisis  in  which  his 
action  requires  some  discussion.  Messrs.  Mason  and 
Slidell  were  sent  by  the  Confederate  Government  as 
their  emissaries  to  England  and  France.  They  got  to 
Havana  and  there  took  ship  again  on  the  British  steamer, 
Trent.  A  watchful  Northern  sea  captain  overhauled 
the  Trent)  took  Mason  and  Slidell  off  her,  and  let  her  go. 
If  he  had  taken  the  course,  far  more  inconvenient  to 
the  Trent,  of  bringing  her  into  a  Northern  harbour, 
where  a  Northern  Prize  Court  might  have  adjudged 
these  gentlemen  to  be  bearers  of  enemy  despatches,  he 
would  have  been  within  the  law.  As  it  was  he  violated 
well-established  usage,  and  no  one  has  questioned  the 
right  and  even  the  duty  of  the  British  Government  to 
demand  the  release  of  the  prisoners*  This  they  did  in 
a  note  of  which  the  expression  was  made  milder  by  the 
wish  of  the  Queen  (conveyed  in  almost  the  last  letter 
of  the  Prince  Consort),  but  which  required  compliance 
within  a  fortnight.  Meanwhile  Secretary  Welles  had 
approved  the  sea  captain's  action.  The  North  was 
jubilant  at  the  capture,  the  more  so  because  Mason  and 
Slidell  were  Southern  statesmen  of  the  lower  type  and 
held  to  be  specially  obnoxious  ;  and  the  House  of 
Representatives,  to  make  matters  worse,  voted  its 
approval  of  what  had  been  done.  Lincoln,  on  the  very 
day  when  the  news  of  the  capture  came,  had  seen  and 

\  said  privately  that  on  the  principles  which  America 
had  itself  upheld  in  the  past  the  prisoners  would  have 
to  be  given  up  with  an  apology.  But  there  is  evidence 
that  he  now  wavered,  and  that,  bent  as  he  was  on 

/  maintaining  a  united  North,  he  was  still  too  distrustful 
of  his  own  better  judgment  as  against  that  of  the 
public.  At  this  very  time  he  was  already  on  other 
points  in  painful  conflict  with  many  friends.  In  any 
case  he  submitted  to  Seward  a  draft  despatch  making 
the  ill-judged  proposal  of  arbitration.  He  gave  way  to 
Seward,  but  at  the  Cabinet  meeting  on  Christmas  Eve, 
at  which  Seward  submitted  a  despatch  yielding  to  the 


THE   OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  263 

British  demand,  it  is  reported  that  Lincoln,  as  well  as 
Chase  and  others,  was  at  first  reluctant  to  agree,  and 
that  it  was  Bates  and  Seward  that  persuaded  the 
Cabinet  to  a  just  and  necessary  surrender. 

This  was  the  last  time  that  there  was  serious  friction 
in  the  actual  intercourse  of  the  two  Governments.  The 
lapse  of  Great  Britain  in  allowing  the  famous  Alabama 
to  sail  was  due  to  delay  and  misadventure  ("  week-ends  " 
or  the  like)  in  the  proceedings  of  subordinate  officials, 
and  was  never  defended,  and  the  numerous  minor 
controversies  that  arose,  as  well  as  the  standing  disagree 
ment  as  to  the  law  of  blockade  never  reached  the  point 
of  danger.  For  all  this  great  credit  was  due  to  Lord 
Lyons  and  to  C.  F.  Adams,  and  to  Seward  also,  when 
he  had  a  little  sobered  down,  but  it  might  seem  as  if  the 
credit  commonly  given  to  Lincoln  by  Americans  rested 
on  little  but  the  single  happy  performance  with  the 
earlier  despatch  which  has  been  mentioned.  Adams 
and  Lyons  were  not  aware  of  his  beneficent  influence — 
the  papers  of  the  latter  contain  little  reference  to  him 
beyond  a  kindly  record  of  a  trivial  conversation,  at  the 
end  of  which,  as  the  Ambassador  was  going  for  a  holiday 
to  England,  the  President  said,  "  Tell  the  English  people 
I  mean  them  no  harm."  Yet  it  is  evident  that  Lincoln's 
supporters  in  America,  the  writer  of  the  Biglow  Papers, 
for  instance,  ascribed  to  him  a  wise,  restraining  power 
in  the  Trent  dispute.  What  is  more,  Lincoln  later 
claimed  this  for  himself.  Two  or  three  years  later,  in 
one  of  the  confidences  with  which  he  often  startled  men 
who  were  but  slight  acquaintances,  but  who  generally 
turned  out  worthy  of  confidence,  he  exclaimed  with 
emphatic  self-satisfaction  :  "  Seward  knows  that  I  am 
his  master,"  and  recalled  with  satisfaction  how  he  had 
forced  Seward  to  yield  to  England  in  the  Trent  affair. 
It  would  have  been  entirely  unlike  him  to  claim  praise 
when  it  was  wholly  undue  to  him  ;  we  find  him,  for 
example,  writing  to  Fox,  of  the  Navy  Department, 
about  "  a  blunder  which  was  probably  in  part  mine, 
and  certainly  was  not  yours " ;  so  that  a  puzzling 
question  arises  here.  It  is  quite  possible  that  Lincoln, 


264  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

who  did  not  press  his  proposal  of  arbitration,  really 
manoeuvred  Seward  and  the  Cabinet  into  full  acceptance 
of  the  British  demands  by  making  them  see  the  conse 
quences  of  any  other  action.  It  is  also,  however,  likely 
enough  that,  being,  as  he  was,  interested  in  arbitration 
generally,  he  was  too  inexperienced  to  see  the  inappro- 
priateness  of  the  proposal  in  this  case.  If  so,  we  may 
none  the  less  credit  him  with  having  forced  Seward  to 
work  for  peace  and  friendly  relations  with  Great  Britain, 
and  made  that  minister  the  agent,  more  skilful  than 
himself,  of  a  peaceful  resolution  which  in  its  origin  was 
his  own. 

5.  The  Great  Questions  of  Domestic  Policy. 

The  larger  questions  of  civil  policy  which  arose  out  of 
the  jact  of  the  war,  and  which  weighed  heavily  on 
Lincoln  before  the  end  of  1861,  can  be  related  with  less 
intricate  detail  if  the  fundamental  point  of  difficulty 
is  made  clear. 

Upon  July  4  Congress  met.  In  an  able  Message 
which  was  a  skilful  but  simple  appeal  not  only  to 
Congress,  but  to  the  "  plain  people,"  the  President  set 
forth  the  nature  of  the  struggle  as  he  conceived  it, 
putting  perhaps  in  its  most  powerful  form  the  contention 
that  the  Union  was  indissoluble,  and  declaring  that 
the  "  experiment  "  of  "  our  popular  government  " 
would  have  failed  once  for  all  if  it  did  not  prove  that 
"  when  ballots  have  fairly  and  constitutionally  decided, 
there  can  be  no  successful  appeal  back  to  bullets."  He 
recounted  the  steps  which  he  had  taken  since  the 
bombardment  of  Fort  Sumter,  some  of  which  might  be 
held  to  exceed  his  constitutional  authority  as  indeed 
they  did,  saying  he  would  have  been  false  to  his  trust 
if  for  fear  of  such  illegality  he  had  let  the  whole  Con 
stitution  perish,  and  asking  that,  if  necessary,  Congress 
should  ratify  them.  He  appealed  to  Congress  now  to 
do  its  part,  and  especially  he  appealed  for  such  prompt 
and  adequate  provision  of  money  and  men  as  would 
enable  the  war  to  be  speedily  brought  to  a  close. 


THE   OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  265 

Congress,  with  but  a  few  dissentient  voices,  chiefly  from 
the  border  States,  approved  all  that  he  had  done,  and 
voted  the  supplies  that  he  had  asked.  Then,  by  a 
resolution  of  both  Houses,  it  defined  the  object  of  the 
war  ;  the  war  was  nbt  for  any  purpose  of  conquest  or 
subjugation,  or  of  "  overthrowing  or  interfering  with 
the  rights  or  established  institutions  "  of  the  Southern 
States  ;  it  was  solely  "  to  preserve  the  Union  with  all 
the  dignity,  equality,  and  rights  of  the  several  States 
unimpaired." 

In  this  resolution  may  be  found  the  clue  to  the 
supreme  political  problem  with  which,  side  by  side  with 
the  conduct  of  the  war,  Lincoln  was  called  upon  to 
grapple  unceasingly  for  the  rest  of  his  life.  That 
problem  lay  in  the  inevitable  change,  as  the  war  dragged 
on,  of  the  political  object  involved  in  it.  The  North  as 
yet  was  not  making  war  upon  the  institutions  of  Southern 
States,  in  other  words  upon  slavery,  and  it  would  have 
been  wrong  to  do  so.  It  was  simply  asserting  the 
supremacy  of  law  by  putting  down  what  every  man  in 
the  North  regarded  as  rebellion.  That  rebellion,  it 
seemed  likely,  would  completely  subside  after  a  decisive 
defeat  or  two  of  the  Southern  forces.  The  law  and  the 
Union  would  then  have  been  restored  as  before.  A  great 
victory  would  in  fact  have  been  won  over  slavery,  for 
the  policy  of  restricting  its  further  spread  would  have 
prevailed,  but  the  constitutional  right  of  each  Southern 
State  to  retain  slavery  within  its  borders,  was  not  to  be 
denied  by  those  who  were  fighting,  as  they  claimed,  for 
the  Constitution. 

Such  at  first  was  the  position  taken  up  by  an 
unanimous  Congress.  It  was  obviously  in  accord  with 
those  political  principles  of  Lincoln  which  have  been 
examined  in  a  former  chapter.  More  than  that,  it  was 
the  position  which,  as  he  thought,  his  official  duty  as 
President  imposed  on  him.  It  is  exceedingly  difficult 
for  any  Englishman  to  follow  his  course  as  the  political 
situation  developed.  He  was  neither  a  dictator,  nor 
an  English  Prime  Minister.  He  was  first  and  foremost 
an  elected  officer  with  powers  and  duties  prescribed  by 


266  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

a  fixed  Constitution  which  he  had  sworn  to  obey.     His 
oath  was  continually  present  to  his  mind. 

He  was  there  to  uphold  the  Union  and  the  laws,  with 
just  so  much  infraction  of  the  letter  of  the  law,  and  no 
more,  as  might  be  obviously  necessary  if  the  Union  and 
the  whole  fabric  of  law  were  not  to  perish. 

The  mere  duration  of  the  war  altered  of  necessity  the 

1   policy  of  the  North  and  of  the  President.     Their  task 

had  presented  itself  as  in  theory  the  "  suppression  of  an 

unlawful  combination  "  within  their  country  ;  it  became 

r  in   manifest   fact   the   reabsorption   of  a   country  now 

hostile,  with  which  reunion  was  possible  only  if  slavery, 

the  fundamental  cause  of  difference,  was  uprooted. 

As  the  hope  6f  a  speedy  victory  and  an  easy  settlement 
vanished,  wide  differences  of  opinion  appeared  again  in 
the  North,  and  the  lines  on  which  this  cleavage  proceeded 
very  soon  showed  themselves.  There  were  those  who 
gladly  welcomed  the  idea  of  a  crusade  against  slavery, 
and  among  them  was  an  unreasonable  section  of  so-called 
Radicals.  These  resented  that  delay  in  a  policy  of 
wholesale  liberation  which  was  enforced  by  legal  and- 
constitutional  scruples,  and  by  such  practical  con 
siderations  as  the  situation  in  the  slave  States  which 
adhered  to  the  North.  There  was,  on  the  other  hand, 
a  "Democratic  party  •pp*siti*n  which  feefore  l*nj  began 
to  revive.  It  combined  many  shades  of  opinion.  There 
were  supporters  or  actual  agents  of  the  South,  few  at 
first  and  very  quiet,  but  ultimately  developing  a  treason 
able  activity.  There  were  those  who  constituted  them 
selves  the  guardians  of  legality  and  jealously  criticised 
all  the  measures  of  emergency  which  became  more  or 
less  necessary.  Of  the  bulk  of  the  Democrats  it  would 
probably  be  fair  to  say  that  their  conscious  intention 
throughout  was  to  be  true  to  the  Union,  but  that 
throughout  they  were  beset  by  a  respect  for  Southern 
rights  which  would  have  gone  far  to  paralyse  the  arm 
of  the  Government.  Lastly,  there  were  Republicans, 
by  no  means  in  sympathy  with  the  Democratic  view, 
who  became  suspect  to  their  Radical  fellows  and  were 
vaguely  classed  together  as  Conservatives.  This  term 


THE  OPENING  OF  THE  WAR  267 

may  be  taken  to  cover  men  simply  of  moderate  and 
cautious,  or  in  some  cases,  of  variable  disposition,  but 
it  included,  too,  some  men  who,  while  rigorous  against 
the  South,  were  half-hearted  in  their  detestation  of 
slavery. 

So  far  as  Lincoln's  private  opinions  were  concerned,  it 
would  have  been  impossible  to  rank  him  in  any  of  these 
sections.  He  had  as  strong  a  sympathy  with  the 
Southern  people  as  any  Democrat,  but  he  was  for  the 
restoration  of  the  Union  absolutely  and  without  com 
promise.  He  was  the  most  cautious  of  men,  but  his 
caution  veiled  a  detestation  of  slavery  of  which  he  once 
said  that  he  could  not  remember  the  time  when  he  had 
not  felt  it.  It  was  his  business,'  so  far  as  might  be,  to 
retain  the  support  of  all  sections  in  the  North  to  the 
Union.  In  the  course,  full  of  painful  deliberation, 
which  we  shall  see  him  pursuing,  he  tried  to  be  guided 
by  a  two-fold  principle  which  he  constantly  avowed. 
The  Union  was  to  be  restored  with  as  few  departures 
from  the  ways  of  the  Constitution  as  was  possible  ;  but 
such  departures  became  his  duty  whenever  he  was 
thoroughly  convinced  that  they  were  needful  for  the 
restoration  of  the  Un  on. 

Before  the  war  was  four  months  old,  the  inevitable 
subject  of  dispute  between  Northern  parties  had  begun 
to  trouble  Lincoln.  As  soon  as  a  Northern  force  set 
foot  on  Southern  soil  s'aves  were  apt  to  escape  to  it, 
and  the  question  arose,  what  should  the  Northern 
general  do  with  them,  for  he  was  not  there  to  make  war 
on  the  private  property  of  Southern  citizens.  General 
Butler — a  newspaper  character  of  some  fame  or  notoriety 
throughout  the  war — commanded  at  Fort  Monroe,  a 
po-nt  on  the  coast  of  Virginia  which  was  always  held 
by  the  North.  He  learnt  that  the  slaves  who  fled  to 
him  had  been  employed  on  making  entrenchments  for 
the  Southern  troops,  so  he  adopted  a  view,  which  took 
the  fancy  of  the  North,  that  they  were  "  contraband  of 
war,"  and  should  be  kept  from  their  owners.  The 
circumstances  in  which  slaves  could  thus  escape  varied 
SO  much  that  great  discretion  must  be  left  to  the  general 


268  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

on  the  spot,  and  the  practice  of  generals  varied.  Lincoln 
was  well  content  to  leave  the  matter  so.  Congress, 
however,  passed  an  Act  by  which  private  property 
could  be  confiscated,  if  used  in  aid  of  the  "  insurrection  " 
but  not  otherwise,  and  slaves  were  similarly  dealt  with. 
This  moderate  provision  as  to  slaves  met  with  a  certain 
amount  of  opposition  ;  it  raised  an  alarming  question  in 
slave  States  like  Missouri  that  had  not  seceded.  Lincoln 
himself  seems  to  have  been  averse  to  any  legislation  on 
the  subject.  He  had  deliberately  concentrated  his 
mind,  or,  as  his  critics  would  have  said,  narrowed  it 
down  to  the  sole  question  of  maintaining  the  Union,  and 
was  resolved  to  treat  all  other  questions  as  subordinate 
to  this. 

Shortly  after,  there  reappeared  upon  the  political 
scene  a  leader  with  what  might  seem  a  more  sympathetic 
outlook.  This  was  Fremont,  Lincoln's  predecessor  as 
the  Republican  candidate  for  the  Presidency.  Fremont 
was  one  of  those  men  who  make  brilliant  and  romantic 
figures  in  their  earlier  career,  and  later  appear  to  have 
lost  all  solid  qualities.  It  must  be  recalled  that,  though 
scarcely  a  professional  soldier  (for  he  had  held  a  com 
mission,  but  served  only  in  the  Ordnance  Survey)  he 
had  conducted  a  great  exploring  expedition,  had  seen 
fighting  as  a  free-lance  in  California,  and,  it  is  claimed, 
had  with  his  handful  of  men  done  much  to  win  that 
great  State  from  Mexico.  Add  to  this  that  he,  a 
Southerner  by  birth,  was  known  among  the  leaders  who 
had  made  California  a  free  State,  and  it  is  plain  how 
appropriate  it  must  have  seemed  when  he  was  set  to 
command  the  Western  Department,  which  for  the 
moment  meant  Missouri.  Here  by  want  of  competence, 
and,  which  was  more  surprising,  lethargy  he  had  made 
a  present  of  some  successes  to  a  Southern  invading 
force,  and  had  sacrificed  the  promising  life  of-  General 
Lyon.  Lincoln,  loath  to  remove  him,  had  made  a  good 
effort  at  helping  him  out  by  tactfully  persuading  a  more 
experienced  general  to  serve  as  a  subordinate  on  his 
staff.  At  the  end  of  August  Fremont  suddenly  issued 
a  proclamation  establishing  martial  law  throughout 


THE   OPENING   OF  THE   WAR  269 

Missouri.  This  contained  other  dangerous  provisions, 
but  above  all  it  liberated  the  slaves  and  confiscated  the 
whole  property  of  all  persons  proved  (before  Court 
Martial)  to  have  taken  active  part  with  the  enemy  in 
the  field.  It  is  obvious  that  such  a  measure  was 
liable  to  shocking  abuse,  that  it  was  certain  to  infuriate 
many  friends  of  the  Union,  and  that  it  was  in  conflict 
with  the  law  which  Congress  had  just  passed  on  the 
subject.  To  Lincoln's  mind  it  presented  the  alarming 
prospect  that  it  might  turn  the  scale  against  the  Union 
cause  in  the  still  pending  deliberations  in  Kentucky. 
Lincoln's  overpowering  solicitude  on  such  a  point  is 
among  the  proofs  that  his  understanding  of  the  military 
situation,  however  elementary,  was  sound.  He  wished, 
characteristically,  that  Fremont  himself  should  withdraw 
his  Proclamation.  He  invited  him  to  withdraw  it  in 
private  letters  from  which  one  sentence  may  be  taken  : 
"  You  speak  of  it  as  being  the  only  means  of  saving  the 
Government.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  itself  the  surrender 
of  the  Government.  Can  it  be  pretended  that  it  is  any 
longer  the  Government  of  the  United  States — any 
government  of  constitution  and  laws — wherein  a  general 
or  a  president  may  make  permanent  rules  of  property  by 
proclamation  ?  "  Fremont  preferred  to  make  Lincoln 
publicly  overrule  him,  which  he  did  ;  and  the  inevitable 
consequence  followed.  When  some  months  later,  the 
utter  military  disorganisation,  which  Fremont  let  arise 
while  he  busied  himself  with  politics,  and  the  scandalous 
waste,  out  of  which  his  flatterers  enriched  themselves, 
compelled  the  President  to  remove  him  from  his  com 
mand,  Fremont  became,  for  a  time  at  least,  to  patriotic 
crowds  and  to  many  intelligent,  upright  and  earnest 
men  from  St.  Louis  to  Boston  the  chivalrous  and  pure- 
hearted  soldier  of  freedom,  and  Lincoln,  the  soulless 
politician,  dead  to  the  cause  of  liberty,  who,  to  gratify 
a  few  wire-pulling  friends,  had  struck  this  hero  down  on 
the  eve  of  victory  to  his  army — an  army  which,  by  the 
way,  he  had  reduced  almost  to  nonentity. 

This  salient  instance  explains  well  enough  the  nature 
of   one    half    of    the    trial   which   Lincoln   throughout 


2 70  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  war  had  to  undergo.  Pursuing  the  restoration  of  the 
Union  with  a  thoroughness  which  must  estrange  from 
him  the  Democrats  of  the  North,  he  was  fated  from  the 
first  to  estrange  also  Radicals  who  were  generally  as 
devoted  to  the  Union  as  himself  and  with  whose  over 
mastering  hatred  of  slavery  he  really  sympathised. 
In  the  following  chapter  we  are  more  concerned  with  the 
other  half  of  his  trial,  the  war  itself.  Of  his  minor 
political  difficulties  few  instances  need  be  given — only  it 
must  be  remembered  that  they  were  many  and  involved, 
besides  delicate  questions  of  principle,  the  careful  sifting 
of  much  confident  hearsay  ;  and,  though  the  critics  of 
public  men  are  wont  to  forget  it,  that  there  are  only 
twenty-four  hours  in  the  day. 

But  the  year  1861  was  to  close  with  a  further  vexation 
that  must  be  related.  Secretary  Cameron  proved 
incapable  on  the  business  side  of  war  administration. 
Waste  and  alleged  corruption  called  down  upon  him  a 
searching  investigation  by  a  committee  of  the  House  of 
Representatives.  He  had  not  added  to  his  own  con 
siderable  riches,  but  his  political  henchmen  had  grown 
fat.  The  displeasure  with  the  whole  Administration 
was  the  greater  because  the  war  was  not  progressing 
favourably,  or  at  all.  There  were  complaints  of  the 
Naval  Department  also,  but  politicians  testified  their 
belief  in  the  honesty  of  Welles  without  saying  a  word 
for  Cameron.  There  is  every  reason  to  think  he  was  not 
personally  dishonourable.  Lincoln  believed  in  his  com 
plete  integrity,  and  so  also  did  sterner  critics,  Chase,  an 
apostle  of  economy  and  uprightness,  and  Senator 
Sumner.  But  he  had  to  go.  He  opened  the  door  for 
his  removal  by  a  circular  to  generals  on  the  subject  of 
slaves,  which  was  comparable  to  Fremont's  Proclamation 
and  of  which  Lincoln  had  to  forbid  the  issue.  He 
accepted  the  appointment  of  Minister  to  Russia,  and 
when,  before  long,  he  returned,  he  justified  himself 
and  Lincoln's  judgment  by  his  disinterested  friendship 
and  support.  He  was  removed  from  the  War  Office  at 
the  end  of  December  and  a  remarkable  incident  followed. 
While  Lincoln's  heart  was  still  set  on  his  law  practice,  the 


THE  OPENING   OF  THE   WAR  271 

prospect  of  appearing  as  something  more  than  a  back 
woods  attorney  smiled  for  a  single  moment  on  him.  He 
was  briefed  to  appear  in  an  important  case  outside 
Illinois  with  an  eminent  lawyer  from  the  East,  Edwin 
M.  Stanton  ;  but  he  was  not  allowed  to  open  his  mouth, 
for  Stanton  snuffed  him  out  with  supreme  contempt, 
and  he  returned  home  crestfallen.  Stantcn  before  the 
war  was  a  strong  Democrat,  but  hated  slavery.  In  the 
last  days  of  Buchanan's  Presidency  he  was  made 
Attorney-General  and  helped  much  to  restore  the  lost 
credit  of  that  Administration.  He  was  now  in  Washing 
ton,  criticising  the  slow  conduct  of  the  war  with  that 
explosive  fury  and  scorn  which  led  him  to  commit 
frequent  injustice  (at  the  very  end  of  the  war  he  publicly 
and  monstrously  accused  Sherman  of  being  bribed  into 
terms  of  peace  by  Southern  gold),  which  concealed  from 
most  eyes  his  real  kindness  and  a  lurking  tenderness  of 
heart,  but  which  made  him  a  vigorous  administrator 
intolerant  of  dishonesty  and  inefficiency.  He  was  more 
contemptuous  of  Lincoln  than  ever,  he  would  constantly 
be  denouncing  his  imbecility,  and  it  is  incredible  that 
kind  friends  were  wanting  to  convey  his  opinion  to 
Lincoln.  Lincoln  made  him  Secretary  of  War. 

Since  the  summer,  to  the  impatient  bewilderment  of 
the  Northern  people,  of  Congress,  now  again  in  Session, 
and  of  the  President  himself,  their  armies  in  the  field 
were  accomplishing  just  nothing  at  all,  and,  as  this 
agitating  year,  1861,  closed,  a  deep  gloom  settled  on 
the  North,  to  be  broken  after  a  while  by  the  glare  of 
recurrent  disaster. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE    DISASTERS    OF    THE    NORTH 

I.  Military  Policy  of  the  North. 

THE  story  of  the  war  has  here  to  be  told  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  civilian  administrator,  the  President ; 
stirring  incidents  of  combat  and  much  else  of  interest 
must  be  neglected  ;  episodes  in  the  war  which  peculiarly 
concerned  him,  or  have  given  rise  to  controversy  about 
him,  must  be  related  lengthily.  The  President  was  an 
inexperienced  man.  It  should  be  said,  too — for  respect 
requires  perfect  frankness — that  he  was  one  of  an  in 
experienced  people.  The  Americans  had  conquered 
their  independence  from  Great  Britain  at  the  time  when 
the  ruling  factions  of  o-ur  country  had  reached  their 
utmost  degree  of  inefficiency.  They  had  fought  an 
indecisive  war  with  us  in  1812-14,  while  our  main 
business  was  to  win  at  Salamanca  and  Vittoria.  These 
experiences  in  some  ways  warped  American  ideas  of 
war  and  politics,  and  their  influence  perhaps  survives  to 
this  day.  The  extent  of  the  President's  authority  and 
his  position  in  regard  to  the  advice  he  could  obtain  have 
been  explained.  An  examination  of  the  tangle  in  which 
military  policy  was  first  involved  may  make  the  chief 
incidents  of  the  war  throughout  easier  to  follow. 

Immediately  after  Bull  Run  McClellan  had  been 
summoned  to  Washington  to  command  the  army  of  the 
Potomac.  In  November,  Scott,  worn  out  by  infirmity, 
and  finding  his  authority  slighted  by  "  my  ambitious 
junior,"  retired,  and  thereupon,  McClellan,  while 
retaining  his  immediate  command  upon  the  Potomac, 
was  made  for  the  time  General-in-Chief  over  all  the 
armies  of  the  North.  There  were,  it  should  be  repeated, 
two  other  principal  armies  besides  that  of  the  Potomac  : 


THE   DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH        273 

the  army  of  the  Ohio,  of  which  General  Buell  was 
given  command  in  July  ;  and  that  of  the  West,  to 
which  General  Halleck  was  appointed,  though  Fremont 
seems  to  have  retained  independent  command  in 
Missouri.  All  these  armies  were  in  an  early  stage  of 
formation  and  training,  and  from  a  purely  military  point 
of  view  there  could  be  no  haste  to  undertake  a  movement 
of  invasion  with  any  of  them. 

Three  distinct  views  of  military  policy  were  presented 
to  Lincoln  in  the  early  days.     Scott,  as  soon  as  it  was  | 
clear   that    the    South    meant   real   fighting,    saw   how 
serious  its  resistance  would  be.     His  military  judgment 
was  in  favour  of  a  strictly  defensive  attitude   before 
Washington  ;  of  training  the  volunteers  for  at  least  four 
months  in  healthy  camps  ;  and  of  then  pushing  a  large 
-army  right  down  the  Mississippi  valley  to  New  Orleans, 
making  the  whole  line  of  that  river   secure,  and  estab 
lishing  a  pressure  on  the  South  between  this  Western 
army  and  the  naval  blockade  which  must  slowly  have 
strangled  the  Confederacy.     He  was  aware  that  public 
impatience  might  not  allow  a  rigid  adherence  to  his 
policy,   and  in  fact,  when  his  view  was   made  public 
before   Bull   Run,    "  Scott's   Anaconda,"    coiling   itself 
round    the    Confederacy,    was    the    subject    of    general 
derision.     The  view  of  the  Northern  public  and  of  the 
influential  men  in  Congress  was  in  favour  of  speedy  and, 
as  it  was  hoped,  decisive  action,  and  this  was  understood 
as  involving,  whatever  else  was  done,  an  attempt  soon 
to    capture    Richmond.     In    McClellan's    view,    as    in  \ 
Scott's,  the  first  object  was  the  full  preparation  of  the 
Army,  but  he  would  have  wished  to  wait  till  he  had  a 
fully  trained  force  of  273,000  men  on  the  Potomac,  and 
a  powerful  fleet  with  many  transports  to  support  his 
movements  ;   and,  when  he  had  all  this,  to  move  south 
wards  in  irresistible  force,  both  advancing  direct  into 
Virginia  and  landing  at  points  on  the  coast,  subduing 
each  of  the  Atlantic  States  of  the  Confederacy  in  turn. 
If  the  indefinite  delay  and  the  overwhelming  force  which 
his  fancy  pictured  could  have  been  granted  him,  it  is 
plain,  the  military  critics  have  said,  that  "  he  could  not 


274  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

have  destroyed  the  Southern  armies — they  would  have 
withdrawn  inland,  and  the  heart  of  the  Confederacy 
would  have  remained  untouched."  But  neither  the 
time  nor  the  force  for  which  he  wished  could  be  allowed 
him.  So  he  had  to  put  aside  his  plan,  but  in  some  ways 
perhaps  it  still  influenced  him. 

It  would  have  been  impossible  to  disregard  the 
wishes  of  those,  who  in  the  last  resort  were  masters,  for 
a  vigorous  attempt  on  Richmond,  and  the  continually 
unsuccessful  attempts  that  were  made  did  serve  a 
military  purpose,  for  they  kept  up  a  constant  drain 
upon  the  resources  of  the  South.  In  any  well-thought- 
out  policy  the  objects  both  of  Scott's  plan  and  of  the 
popular  plan  would  have  been  borne  in  mind.  That  no 
such  policy  was  consistently  followed  from  the  first  was 
partly  a  result  of  the  long-continued  difficulty  in  finding 
any  younger  man  who  could  adequately  take  the  place 
of  Scott  ;  it  was  not  for  a  want  of  clear  ideas,  right  or 
wrong,  on  Lincoln's  part. 

Only  two  days  after  the  battle  of  Bull  Run,  he  put 
on  paper  his  own  view  as  to  the  future  employment  of 
the  three  armies.  He  thought  that  one  should 
"  threaten  "  Richmond  ;  that  one  should  move  from 
Cincinnati  in  Ohio,  by  a  pass  called  Cumberland  Gap  in 
Kentucky,  upon  Knoxville  in  Eastern  Tennessee  ;  and 
that  the  third,  using  Cairo  on  the  Mississippi  as  its 
base,  should  advance  upon  Memphis,  some  120  miles 
further  south  on  that  river.  Apparently  he  did  not  at 
first  wish  to  commit  the  army  of  the  Potomac  very 
deeply  in  its  advance  on  Richmond,  and  he  certainly 
wished  throughout  that  it  should  cover  Washington 
against  any  possible  attack.  Memphis  was  one  of  the 
three  points  at  which  the  Southern  railway  system  touched 
the  great  river  and  communicated  with  the  States  beyond 
— Vicksburg  and  New  Orleans,  much  further  south, 
were  the  others.  Knoxville  again  is  a  point,  by  occupy 
ing  which,  the  Northern  forces  would  have  cut  the  direct 
railway  communication  between  Virginia  and  the  West, 
but  for  this  move  into  Eastern  Tennessee  Lincoln  had 
other  reasons  nearer  his  heart.  The  people  of  that 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       275 

region  were  strongly  for  the  Union  ;  they  were  invaded 
by  the  Confederates  and  held  down  by  severe  coercion, 
and  distressing  appeals  from  them  for  help  kept  arriving 
through  the  autumn  ;  could  they  have  been  succoured 
and  their  mountainous  country  occupied  by  the  North, 
a  great  stronghold  of  the  Union  would,  it  seemed  to 
Lincoln,  have  been  planted  securely  far  into  the  midst 
of  the  Confederacy.  Therefore  he  persistently  urged 
this  part  of  his  scheme  on  the  attention  of  his  generals. 
The  chief  military  objection  raised  by  Buell  was  that 
his  army  would  have  to  advance  150  miles  from  the 
nearest  base  of  supply  upon  a  railway ;  (for  200  miles 
to  the  west  of  the  Alleghanies  there  were  no  railways 
running  from  north  to  south).  To  meet  this  Lincoln, 
in  September,  urged  upon  a  meeting  of  important 
Senators  and  Representatives  the  construction  of  a 
railway  line  from  Lexington  in  Kentucky  southwards, 
but  his  hearers,  with  their  minds  narrowed  down  to  an 
advance  on  Richmond  seem  to  have  thought  the 
relatively  small  cost  in  time  and  money  of  this  work 
too  great.  Lincoln  still  thought  an  expedition  to 
Eastern  Tennessee  practicable  at  once,  and  it  has  been 
argued  from  the  circumstances  in  which  one  was  made 
nearly  two  years  later  that  he  was  right.  It  would, 
one  may  suppose,  have  been  unwise  to  separate  the 
armies  of  the  Ohio  and  of  the  West  so  widely  ;  for 
the  main  army  of  the  Confederates  in  the  West,  under 
their  most  trusted  general,  Albert  Sidney  Johnston,  was 
from  September  onwards  in  South-western  Kentucky, 
and  could  have  struck  at  either  of  these  two  Northern 
armies  ;  and  this  was  in  Buell' s  mind.  On  the  other 
hand,  Lincoln's  object  was  a  wise  one  in  itself  and  would 
have  been  worth  some  postponement  of  the  advance 
along  the  Mississippi,  if  thereby  the  army  in  the  West 
could  have  been  used  in  support  of  it.  However  this 
may  be,  the  fact  is  that  Lincoln's  plan,  as  it  stood,  was 
backed  up  by  McClellan  ;  McClellan  was  perhaps  unduly 
anxious  for  Buell  to  move  on  Eastern  Tennessee,  because 
this  would  have  supported  the  invasion  of  Virginia  which 
he  himself  was  now  contemplating,  and  he  was  probably 


276  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

forgetful  of  the  West ;  but  lie  was  Lincoln's  highest 
military  adviser  and  his  capacity  was  still  trusted. 
Buell's  own  view  was  that,  when  he  moved,  it  should 
be  towards  Western  Tennessee.  He  would  have  had  a 
railway  connection  behind  him  all  his  way,  and  Albert 
Johnston's  army  would  have  lain  before  him.  He 
wished  that  Halleck  meanwhile  should  advance  up  the 
courses  of  the  Tennessee  and  Cumberland  Rivers  ; 
Eastern  Tennessee  (he  may  have  thought)  would  be  in 
the  end  more  effectively  succoured  ;  their  two  armies 
would  thus  have  converged  on  Johnston's.  Halleck 
agreed  with  Buell  to  the  extent  of  disagreeing  with 
Lincoln  and  McClellan,  but  no  further.  He  declined 
to  move  in  concert  with  Buell.  Fremont  had  dis 
organised  the  army  of  the  West,  and  Halleck,  till  he 
had  repaired  the  mischief,  permitted  only  certain  minor 
enterprises  under  his  command. 

Each  of  the  three  generals,  including  the  General-in- 
Chief,  who  was  the  Government's  chief  adviser,  was  set 
upon  his  own  immediate  purpose,  and  indisposed  to 
understanding  the  situation  of  the  others — Buell  perhaps 
the  least  so.  Each  of  them  had  at  first  a  very  sound 
reason,  the  unreadiness  of  his  army,  for  being  in  no 
hurry  to  move,  but  then  each  of  them  soon  appeared 
to  be  a  slow  or  unenterprising  commander.  Buell 
was  perhaps  unlucky  in  this,  for  his  whole  conduct 
is  the  subject  of  some  controversy ;  but  he  did 
appear  slow,  and  the  two  others,  it  is  universally 
agreed,  really  were  so.  As  1861  drew  to  a  close,  it 
became  urgent  that  something  should  be  done  some 
where,  even  if  it  were  not  done  in  the  best  possible 
direction.  The  political  pressure  upon  the  Administra 
tion  became  as  great  as  before  Bull  Run.  The  army 
of  the  Potomac  had  rapidly  become  a  fine  army,  and 
its  enemy,  in  no  way  superior,  lay  entrenching  at 
Manassas,  twenty  miles  in  front  of  it.  When  Lincoln 
grew  despondent  and  declared  that  "  if  something  was 
not  done  soon,  the  bottom  would  drop  out  of  the  whole 
concern,"  soldiers  remark  that  the  military  situation 
was  really  sound ;  but  he  was  right,  for  a  people  can 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       277 

hardly  be  kept  [up  to  the  pitch  of  a  high  enterprise  if 
it  is  forced  to  think  that  nothing  will  happen.  Before 
the  end  of  the  year  1861  military  reasons  for  waiting 
were  no  longer  being  urged  ;  McClellan  had  long  been 
promising  immediate  action,  Buell  and  Halleck  seemed 
merely  unable  to  agree. 

In  later  days  when  Lincoln  had  learnt  much  by  ex 
perience  it  is  hard  to  trace  the  signs  of  his  influence  in 
military  matters,  because,  though  he  followed  them 
closely,  he  was  commonly  in  full  agreement  with  his 
chief  general  and  he  invariably  and  rightly  left  him 
free.  At  this  stage,  when  his  position  was  more  difficult, 
and  his  guidance  came  from  common  sense  and  the 
military  books,  of  which,  ever  since  Bull  Run,  he  had 
been  trying,  amidst  all  his  work,  to  tear  out  the  heart, 
there  is  evidence  on  which  to  judge  the  intelligence 
which  he  applied  to  the  war.  Certainly  he  now  and  ever 
after  looked  at  the  matter  as  a  whole  and  formed  a  clear 
view  of  it,  which,  for  a  civilian  at  any  rate,  was  a  reason 
able  view.  Certainly  also  at  this  time  and  for  long  after 
no  military  adviser  attempted,  in  correcting  any  error  of 
his,  to  supply  him  with  a  better  opinion  equally  clear  and 
comprehensive.  This  is  probably  why  some  Northern 
military  critics,  when  they  came  to  read  his  corre 
spondence  with  his  generals,  called  him,  as  his  chief 
biographers  were  tempted  to  think  him,  "  the  ablest 
strategist  of  the  war."  Grant  and  Sherman  did  not 
say  this*;  they  said,  what  is  another  thing,  that  his  was 
the  greatest  intellectual  force  that  they  had  met  with. 
Strictly  speaking,  he  could  not  be  a  strategist.  If  he 
were  so  judged,  he  would  certainly  be  found  guilty  of 
having,  till  Grant  came  to  Washington,  unduly  scattered 
his  forces.  He  could  pick  out  the  main  objects  ;  but 
as  to  how  to  economise  effort,  what  force  and  how 
composed  and  equipped  was  necessary  for  a  particular 
enterprise,  whether  in  given  conditions  of  roads,  weather, 
supplies,  and  previous  fatigue,  a  movement  was  prac 
ticable,  and  how  long  it  would  take,  any  clever  subaltern 
with  actual  experience  of  campaigning  ought  to  have 
been  a  better  judge  than  he.  The  test,  which  the 


278  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

reader  must  be  asked  to  apply  to  his  conduct  of  the  war, 
is  whether  he  followed  duly  or  unduly  his  own  imperfect 
judgment,  whether,  on  the  whole,  he  gave  in  whenever 
it  was  wise  to  the  generals  under  him,  and  whether  he 
did  so  without  losing  his  broad  view  or  surrendering  his 
ultimate  purpose.  It  is  really  no  small  proof  of  strength 
that,  with  the  definite  judgments  which  he  constantly 
formed,  he  very  rarely  indeed  gave  imperative  orders 
as  Commander-in-Chief,  which  he  was,  to  any  general. 
The  circumstances,  all  of  which  will  soon  appear,  in 
which  he  was  tempted  or  obliged  to  do  so,  are  only  the 
few  marked  exceptions  to  his  habitual  conduct.  There 
are  significant  contrary  instances  in  which  he  abstained 
even  from  seeking  to  know  his  general's  precise  in 
tentions.  At  the  time  which  has  just  been  reviewed, 
when  the  scheme  of  the  war  was  in  the  making,  his 
correspondence  with  Buell  and  Halleck  show  his 
fundamental  intention.  He  emphatically  abstains 
from  forcing  them ;  he  lucidly,  though  not  so  tactfully 
as  later,  urges  his  own  view  upon  the  consideration  of 
his  general,  begging  him,  not  necessarily  to  act  upon  it, 
but  at  least  to  see  the  point,  and  if  he  will  not  do  what 
is  wished,  to  form  and  explain  as  clearly  a  plan  for  doing 
something  better. 

2.  The  War  in  the  West  up  to  May,  1862. 

The  pressure  upon  McClellan  to  move  grew  stronger 
and  indeed  more  justifiable  month  after  month,  and 
when  at  last  in  March,  1862,  McClellan  did  move,  the 
story  of  the  severest  adversity  to  the  North,  of  Lincoln's 
sorest  trials,  and,  some  still  say,  his  gravest  failures, 
began.  Its  details  will  concern  us  more  than  those  of 
any  other  part  of  the  war.  But  events  in  the  West 
began  earlier,  proceeded  faster,  and  should  be  told  first. 
Buell  could  not  obtain  from  McClellan  permission  to 
carry  out  his  own  scheme.  He  did,  however,  obtain 
permission  for  Halleck,  if  he  consented,  to  send  flotillas 
up  the  Tennessee  and  Cumberland  Rivers  to  make  a 
diversion  while  Buell,  as  Lincoln  had  proposed  and  as 
McClellan  had  now  ordered,  marched  upon  Eastern 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE   NORTH       279 

Tennessee.  Halleck  would  not  move.  Buell  prepared 
to  move  alone,  and  in  January,  1862,  sent  forward  a 
small  force  under  Thomas  to  meet  an  equally  small 
Confederate  force  that  had  advanced  through  Cumber 
land  Gap  into  Eastern  Kentucky.  Thomas  won  a 
complete  victory,  most  welcome  as  the  first  success  since 
the  defeat  of  Bull  Run,  at  a  place  called  Mill  Springs, 
far  up  the  Cumberland  River  towards  the  mountains. 
But  at  the  end  of  January,  while  Buell  was  following 
up  with  his  forces  rather  widely  dispersed  because  he 
expected  no  support  from  Halleck,  he  was  brought  to 
a  stop,  for  Halleck,  without  warning,  did  make  an 
important  movement  of  his  own,  in  which  he  would 
need  BuelPs  support. 

The  Cumberland  and  the  Tennessee  are  navigable 
rivers  which  in  their  lower  course  flow  parallel  in  a 
northerly  or  north-westerly  direction  to  join  the  Ohio 
not  far  above  its  junction  with  the  Mississippi  at  Cairo. 
Fort  Henry  was  a  Confederate  fort  guarding  the  navi 
gation  of  the  Tennessee  near  the  northern  boundary 
of  the  State  of  that  name,  Fort  Donelson  was  another 
on  the  Cumberland  not  far  off.  Ulysses  Simpson  Grant, 
who  had  served  with  real  distinction  in  the  Mexican 
war,  had  retired  from  the  Army  and  had  been  more  or 
less  employed  about  his  father's  leather  store  in  Illinois 
and  in  the  gloomy  pursuit  of  intoxication  and  of  raising 
small  sums  from  reluctant  friends  when  he  met  them. 
On  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil  War  he  suddenly  pulled 
himself  together,  and  with  some  difficulty  got  employ 
ment  from  the  Governor  of  Illinois  as  a  Major-General  in 
the  State  Militia  (obtaining  Army  rank  later).  Since 
then,  while  serving  under  Halleck,  he  had  shown 
sense  and  promptitude  in  seizing  an  important  point 
on  the  Ohio,  upon  which  the  Confederates  had  designs. 
He  had  a  quick  eye  for  seeing  important  points. 
Grant  was  now  ordered  or  obtained  permission  from 
Halleck  to  capture  Fort  Henry  and  Fort  Donelson. 
By  the  sudden  movements  of  Grant  and  of  the  flotilla 
acting  with  him,  the  Confederates  were  forced  to 
abandon  Fort  Henry  on  February  6,  1862.  Ten  days 


280  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

later  Fort  Donelson  surrendered  with  nearly  10,000 
prisoners,  after  a  brilliant  and  nearly  successful  sortie 
by  the  garrison,  in  which  Grant  showed,  further,  tenacity 
and  a  collected  mind  under  the  pressure  of  imminent 
calamity.  Halleck  had  given  Grant  little  help.  Buell 
was  reluctant  to  detach  any  of  his  volunteer  troops  from 
their  comrades  to  act  with  a  strange  army,  and  Halleck 
had  not  warned  him  of  his  intentions.  Halleck  soon 
applied  to  Lincoln  for  the  supreme  command  over  the 
two  Western  armies  with  Buell  under  him.  This  was 
given  to  him.  Experience  showed  that  one  or  the  other 
must  command  now  that  concerted  action  was  necessary. 
Nothing  was  known  at  Washington  to  set  against 
Halleck's  own  claim  of  the  credit  for  the  late  successes. 
So  Lincoln  gave  him  the  command,  though  present 
knowledge  shows  clearly  that  Buell  was  the  better  man. 
Grant  had  been  left  before  Fort  Donelson  in  a  position 
of  some  danger  from  the  army  under  Albert  Johnston ; 
and,  from  needless  fear  of  Beauregard  with  a  Confederate 
force  under  him  yet  further  West,  Halleck  let  slip  the 
chance  of  sending  Grant  in  pursuit  of  Johnston,  who  was 
falling  back  up  the  Cumberland  valley.  As  it  was, 
Johnston  for  a  time  evacuated  Nashville,  further  up  the 
Cumberland,  the  chief  town  of  Tennessee  and  a  great 
railway  centre,  which  Buell  promptly  occupied  ;  Beaure 
gard  withdrew  the  Confederate  troops  from  Columbus, 
a  fortress  of  great  reputed  strength  on  the  Mississippi 
not  far  below  Cairo,  to  positions  forty  or  fifty  miles 
(as  the  crow  flies)  further  down  the  stream.  Thus,  as  it 
was,  some  important  steps  had  been  gained  in  securing 
that  control  of  the  navigation  of  the  river  which  was  one 
of  the  great  military  objects  of  the  North.  Furthermore, 
successful  work  was  being  done  still  further  West  by 
General  Curtis  in  Missouri,  who  drove  an  invading  force 
back  into  Arkansas  and  inflicted  a  crushing  defeat  upon 
them  there  in  March.  But  a  great  stroke  should  now 
have  been  struck.  Buell,  it  is  said,  saw  plainly  that  his 
forces  and  Halleck's  should  have  been  concentrated  as 
far  up  the  Tennessee  as  possible  in  an  endeavour  to 
seize  upon  the  main  railway  system,  of  the  Confederacy  in 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH        281 

the  West,  Halleck  preferred,  it  would  seem,  to  concen 
trate  upon  nothing  and  to  scatter  his  forces  upon  minor 
enterprises,  provided  he  did  not  risk  any  important 
engagement.  An  important  engagement  with  the  hope 
of  destroying  an  army  of  the  enemy  was  the  very  thing 
which,  as  Johnston's  forces  now  stood,  he  should  have 
sought,  but  he  appears  to  have  been  contented  by  the 
temporary  retirement  of  an  unscathed  enemy  who  would 
return  again  reinforced.  Buell  was  an  unlucky  man, 
and  Halleck  got  quite  all  he  deserved,  so  it  is  possible 
that  events  have  been  described  to  us  without  enough 
regard  to  Halleck's  case  as  against  Buell.  But  at  any 
rate,  while  much  should  have  been  happening,  nothing 
very  definite  did  happen,  till  April  6,  when  Albert 
Johnston,  now  strongly  reinforced  from  the  extreme 
South,  came  upon  Grant,  who  (it  is  not  clear  why)  had 
lain  encamped,  without  entrenching,  and  not  expecting 
immediate  attack,  near  Shiloh,  far  up  the  Tennessee 
River  in  the  extreme  south  of  Tennessee  State.  Buell 
at  the  time,  though  without  clear  information  as  to 
Grant's  danger,  was  on  his  way  to  join  him.  There 
seems  to  have  been  negligence  both  on  Halleck's  part 
and  on  Grant's.  The  battle  of  Shiloh  is  said  to  have 
been  highly  characteristic  of  the  combats  of  partly 
disciplined  armies,  in  which  the  individual  qualities, 
good  or  bad,  of  the  troops  play  a  conspicuous  part. 
Direction  on  the  part  of  Johnston  or  Grant  was  not 
conspicuously  seen,  but  the  latter,  whose  troops  were 
surprised  and  driven  back  some  distance,  was  intensely 
determined.  In  the  course  of  that  afternoon  Albert 
Johnston  was  killed.  Rightly  or  wrongly  Jefferson 
Davis  and  his  other  friends  regarded  his  death  as  the 
greatest  of  calamities  to  the  South.  After  the  manner 
of  many  battles,  more  especially  in  this  war,  the  battle 
of.  Shiloh  was  the  subject  of  long  subsequent  dispute 
between  friends  of  Grant  and  of  Buell,  and  far  more 
bitter  dispute  between  friends  of  Albert  Johnston  and 
Beauregard.  But  it  seems  that  the  South  was  on  the 
point  of  winning,  till  late  on  the  6th  the  approach  of 
the  first  reinforcements  from  Buell  made  it  useless  to 


282  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

attempt  more.  By  the  following  morning  further  large 
reinforcements  had  come  up  ;  Grant  in  his  turn  attacked, 
and  Beauregard  had  difficulty  in  turning  a  precipitate 
retirement  into  an  orderly  retreat  upon  Corinth,  forty 
miles  away,  a  junction  upon  the  principal  railway  line 
to  be  defended.  The  next  day  General  Pope,  who  had 
some  time  befose  been  detached  by  Halleck  for  this 
purpose,  after  arduous  work  in  canal  cutting,  cap 
tured,  with  7,000  prisoners,  the  northernmost  forts  held 
by  the  Confederacy  on  the  Mississippi.  But  Halleck's 
plans  required  that  his  further  advance  should  be 
stopped.  Halleck  himself,  in  his  own  time,  arrived  at 
the  front.  In  his  own  time,  after  being  joined  by  Pope, 
he  advanced,  carefully  entrenching  himself  every  night. 
He  covered  in  something  over  a  month  the  forty  miles 
route  to  Corinth,  which,  to  his  surprise,  was  bloodlessly 
evacuated  before  him.  He  was  an  engineer,  and  like 
some  other  engineers  in  the  Civil  War  was  overmuch 
set  upon  a  methodical  and  cautious  procedure.  But 
his  mere  advance  to  Corinth  caused  the  Confederates 
to  abandon  yet  another  fort  on  the  Mississippi,  and 
on  June  6,  the  Northern  troops  were  able  to  occupy 
Memphis,  for  which  Lincoln  had  long  wished,  while  the 
flotilla  accompanying  them  destroyed  a  Confederate 
flotilla.  Meanwhile,  on  May  I,  Admiral  Farragut,  daringly 
running  up  the  Mississippi,  had  captured  New  Orleans, 
and  a  Northern  force  under  Butler  was  able  to  establish 
itself  in  Louisiana.  The  North  had  now  gained  the  com 
mand  of  most  of  the  Mississippi,  for  only  the  hundred 
miles  or  so  between  Vicksburg  far  south  and  Port  Hudson, 
between  that  and  New  Orleans,  was  still  held  by  the 
South  ;  and  command  by  Northern  gunboats  of  the  chief 
tributaries  of  the  great  river  was  also  established.  The 
Confederate  armies  in  the  West  were  left  intact,  though 
with  some  severe  losses,  and  would  be  able  before  long  to 
strike  northward  in  a  well-chosen  direction ;  for  all  that 
these  were  great  and  permanent  gains.  Yet  the  North 
was  not  cheered.  The  great  loss  of  life  at  Shiloh,  the 
greatest  battle  in  the  war  so  far,  created  a  horrible  im 
pression.  Halleck,  under  whom  all  this  progress  had 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE   NORTH        283 

been  made,  properly  enough  received  a  credit,  which 
critics  later  have  found  to  be  excessive,  though  it  is 
plain  that  he  had  reorganised  his  army  well ;  but  Grant 
was  felt  to  have  been  caught  napping  at  Shiloh  ;  there 
were  other  rumours  about  him  too,  and  he  fell  deep  into 
general  disfavour.  The  events  of  the  Western  war  did 
not  pause  for  long,  but,  till  the  end  of  this  year  1862, 
the  North  made  no  further  definite  progress,  and  the 
South,  though  it  was  able  to  invade  the  North,  achieved 
no  important  result.  It  will  be  well  then  here  to  take 
up  the  story  of  events  in  the  East  and  to  follow  them 
continuously  till  May,  1863,  when  the  dazzling  fortune 
of  the  South  in  that  theatre  of  the  war  reached  its 
highest  point. 

3.  The  War  in  the  East  up  to  May,  1863. 

The  interest  of  this  part  of  the  Civil  War  lies  chiefly 
in  the  achievements  of  Lee  and  "  Stonewall  "  Jackson. 
From  the  point  of  view  of  the  North,  it  was  not  only 
disastrous  but  forms  a  dreary  and  controversial  chapter. 
George  McClellan  came  to  Washington  amid  overwhelm 
ing  demonstrations  of  public  confidence.  His  com 
parative  youth  added  to  the  interest  taken  in  him  ;  and 
he.  was  spoken  of  as  "  the  young  Napoleon."  This 
ridiculous  name  for  a  man  already  thirty-four  was  a  sign 
that  the  people  expected  impossible  things  from  him. 
Letters  to  his  wife,  which  have  been  injudiciously 
published,  show  him  to  us  delighting  at  first  in  the  con 
sideration  paid  to  him  by  Lincoln  and  Scott,  proudly 
confident  in  his  own  powers,  rather  elated  than  other 
wise  by  a  sense  that  the  safety  of  the  country  rested  on 
him  alone.  "  I  shall  carry  the  thing  en  grande,  and  crush 
the  rebels  in  one  campaign."  He  soon  had  a  magnificent 
army  ;  he  may  be  said  to  have  made  it  himself.  Before, 
as  he  thought,  the  time  had  come  to  use  it,  he  had  fallen 
from  favour,  and  a  dead  set  was  being  made  against 
him  in  Washington.  A  little  later,  at  the  crisis  of  his 
great  venture,  when,  as  he  claimed,  the  Confederate 
capital  could  have  been  taken,  his  expedition  was 
recalled.  Then  at  a  moment  of  deadly  peril  to  the 


284  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

country  his  services  were  again  called  in.  He  warded  off 
the  danger.  Yet  a  little  while  and  his  services  were 
discarded  for  ever.  This  summary,  which  is  the  truth, 
but  not  the  whole  truth,  must  enlist  a  certain  sympathy 
for  him.  The  chief  fact  of  his  later  life  should  at  once 
be  added.  In  1864  when  a  Presidential  election  was 
approaching  and  despondency  prevailed  widely  in  the 
North,  he  was  selected  as  the  champion  of  a  great  party. 
The  Democrats  adopted  a  "  platform  "  which  expressed 
neither  more  nor  less  than  a  desire  to  end  the  war  on 
any  terms.  In  accordance  with  the  invariable  tradition 
of  party  opposition  in  war  time,  they  chose  a  war  hero 
as  their  candidate  for  the  Presidency.  McClellan  publicly 
repudiated  their  principles,  and  no  doubt  he  meant  it, 
but  he  became  their  candidate — their  master  or  their 
servant  as  it  might  prove.  That  he  was  Lincoln's 
opponent  in  the  election  of  that  year  ensured  that  his 
merits  and  his  misfortunes  would  be  long  remembered, 
but  his  action  then  may  suggest  to  anyone  the  doubtful 
point  in  his  career  all  along. 

Some  estimate  of  his  curious  yet  by  no  means  un 
common  type  of  character  is  necessary,  if  Lincoln's 
relations  with  him  are  to  be  understood  at  all.  The 
devotion  to  him  shown  by  his  troops  proves  that  he 
had  great  titles  to  confidence,  besides,  what  he  also  had, 
a  certain  faculty  of  parade,  with  his  handsome  charger, 
his  imposing  staff  and  the  rest.  He  was  a  great  trainer 
of  soldiers,  and,  with  some  strange  lapses,  a  good 
organiser.  He  was  careful  for  the  welfare  of  his  men  ; 
and  his  almost  tender  carefulness  of  their  lives  contrasted 
afterwards  with  what  appeared  the  ruthless  carelessness 
of  Grant.  Unlike  some  of  his  successors,  he  could  never 
be  called  an  incapable  commander.  His  great  opponent, 
Lee,  who  had  known  him  of  old,  was  wont  to  calculate 
on  his  extraordinary  want  of  enterprise,  but  he  spoke 
of  him  on  the  whole  in  terms  of  ample  respect — also, 
by  the  way,  he  sympathised  with  him  like  a  soldier 
when,  as  he  naturally  assumed,  he  became  a  victim  to 
scheming  politicians  ;  and  Lee  confided  this  feeling 
to  the  ready  ears  of  another  great  soldier,  Wolseley. 


THE  DISASTERS   OF  THE   NORTH       285 

As  he  showed  himself  in  civil  life,  McClellan  was  an 
attractive  gentleman  of  genial  address  ;  it  was  voted  that 
he  was  "  magnetic,"  and  his  private  life  was  so  entirely 
irreproachable  as  to  afford  lively  satisfaction.  More 
than  this,  it  may  be  conjectured,  that  to  a  certain 
standard  of  honour,  loyalty,  and  patriotism,  which  he 
set  consciously  before  himself,  he  would  always  have 
been  devotedly  true.  But  if  it  be  asked  further  whether 
McClellan  was  the  desired  instrument  for  Lincoln's 
and  the  country's  needs,  and  whether,  as  the  saying  is, 
he  was  a  man  to  go  tiger-hunting  with,  something 
very  much  against  him,  though  hard  to  define,  appears 
in  every  part  of  his  record  (except  indeed,  one  perform 
ance  in  his  Peninsular  Campaign).  Did  he  ever  do  his 
best  to  beat  the  enemy  ?  Did  he  ever,  except  for  a 
moment,  concentrate  himself  singly  upon  any  great 
object  ?  Were  even  his  preparations  thorough  ?  Was 
his  information  ever  accurate  ?  Was  his  purpose  in 
the  war  ever  definite,  and,  if  so,  made  plain  to  his 
Government  ?  Was  he  often  betrayed  into  marked 
frankness,  or  into  marked  generosity  ?  No  one  would 
be  ready  to  answer  yes  to  any  of  these  questions. 
McClellan  fills  so  memorable  a  place  in  American  history 
that  he  demands  such  a  label  as  can  be  given  to  him. 
In  the  most  moving  and  the  most  authentic  of  all 
Visions  of  Judgment,  men  were  not  set  on  the  right  hand 
or  the  left  according  as  they  were  of  irreproachable  or 
reproachable  character  ;  they  were  divided  into  those 
who  did  and  those  who  did  not.  In  the  provisional 
judgment  which  men,  if  they  make  it  modestly,  should 
at  times  make  with  decision,  McClellan's  place  is  clear. 
The  quality,  "  spiacente  a  Dio  ed  ai  nemici  suoi,"  of  the 
men  who  did  not,  ran  through  and  through  him. 

Lincoln  required  first  a  general  who  would  make  no 
fatal  blunder,  but  he  required  too,  when  he  could  find 
him,  a  general  of  undaunted  enterprise  ;  he  did  not  wish 
to  expose  the  North  to  disaster,  but  he  did  mean  to 
conquer  the  South.  There  was  some  security  in  employ 
ing  McClellan,  though  employing  him  did  at  one  time 
throw  on  Lincoln's  unfit  shoulders  the  task  of  defending 


286  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Washington.  It  proved  very  hard  to  find  another 
general  equally  trustworthy.  But,  in  the  light  of  facts 
which  Lincoln  came  to  perceive,  it  proved  impossible 
to  consider  McClellan  as  the  man  to  finish  the  war. 

We  need  only  notice  the  doings  of  the  main  armies 
in  this  theatre  of  the  war  and  take  no  account  of  various 
minor  affairs  at  outlying  posts.  From  the  battle  of 
Bull  Run,  which  was  on  July  21,  1861,  to  March  5, 
1862,  the  Southern  army  under  Joseph  Johnston  lay 
quietly  drilling  at  Manassas.  It,  of  course,  entrenched 
its  position,  but  to  add  to  the  appearance  of  its  strength, 
it  constructed  embrasures  for  more  than  its  number  of 
guns  and  had  dummy  guns  to  show  in  them.  At  one 
moment  there  was  a  prospect  that  it  might  move. 
Johnston  and  the  general  with  him  had  no  idea  of 
attacking  the  army  of  the  Potomac  where  it  lay,  but 
they  did  think  that  with  a  further  50,000  or  60,000 
they  might  successfully  invade  Maryland,  crossing 
higher  up  the  Potomac,  and  by  drawing  McClellan  away 
from  his  present  position,  get  a  chance  of  defeating  him. 
The  Southern  President  came  to  Manassas,  at  their 
invitation  on  October  I,  but  he  did  not  think  well  to 
withdraw  the  trained  men  whom  he  could  have  sent 
to  Johnston  from  the  various  points  in  the  South  at 
which  they  were  stationed  ;  he  may  have  had  good 
reasons  but  it  is  likely  that  he  sacrificed  one  of  the 
best  chances  of  the  South.  McClellan's  army  was  soon 
in  as  good  a  state  of  preparation  as  Johnston's.  Early 
in  October  McClellan  had,  on  his  own  statement,  over 
147,000  men  at  his  disposal ;  Joseph  Johnston,  on  his 
own  statement,  under  47,000.  Johnston  was  well 
informed  as  to  McClellan's  numbers — very  likely  he  could 
get  information  from  Maryland  more  easily  than 
McClellan  from  Virginia.  The  two  armies  lay  not 
twenty-five  miles  apart.  The  weather  and  ,the  roads 
were  good  to  the  end  of  December^  the  roads  were 
practicable  by  March  and  they  seem  to  have  been  so  all 
the  time.  As  spring  approached,  it  appeared  to  the 
Southern  generals  that  McClellan  must  soon  advance. 
Johnston  thought  that  his  right  flank  was  liable  to  be 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       287 

turned  and  the  railway  communications  south  of 
Manassas  liable  to  be  cut.  In  the  course  of  February 
it  was  realised  that  his  position  was  too  dangerous  ; 
the  large  stores  accumulated  there  were  removed  ;  and 
''when,  early  in  March,  there  were  reports  of  unusual 
activity  in  the  Northern  camp,  Johnston,  still  expecting 
attack  from  the  same  direction,  began  his  retreat. 
On  March  9,  it  was  learned  in  Washington  that 
Manassas  had  been  completely  evacuated.  McClellan 
marched  his  whole  army  there,  and  marched  it  back. 
Johnston  withdrew  quietly  behind  the  Rapidan  river, 
some  30  miles  further  south,  and  to  his  surprise  was  left 
free  from  any  pursuit. 

For  months  past  the  incessant  report  in  the  papers, 
"  all  quiet  upon  the  Potomac,"  had  been  getting  upon 
the  nerves  of  the  North.  The  gradual  conversion  of  their 
pride  in  an  imposing  army  into  puzzled  rage  at  its 
inactivity  has  left  a  deeper  impression  on  Northern 
memories  than  the  shock  of  disappointment  at  Bull  Run. 
Public  men  of  weight  had  been  pressing  for  an  advance 
in  November,  and  when  the  Joint  Committee  of  Congress, 
an  arbitrary  and  meddlesome,  but  able  and  perhaps  on 
the  whole  useful  body,  was  set  up  in  December,  it  brought 
its  full  influence  to  bear  on  the  President.  Lincoln  was 
already  anxious  enough  ;  he  wished  to  rouse  McClellan 
himself  to  activity,  while  he  screened  him  against  exces 
sive  impatience  or  interference  with  his  plans.  It  is  im 
possible  to  say  what  was  McClellan's  real  mind.  Quite 
early  he  seems  to  have  held  out  hopes  to  Lincoln  that 
he  would  soon  attack,  but  he  was  writing  to  his  wife 
that  he  expected  to  be  attacked  by  superior  numbers. 
It  is  certain,  however,  that  he  was  possessed  now  and 
always  by  a  delusion  as  to  the  enemy's  strength.  For 
instance  :  Lincoln  at  last  felt  bound  to  work  out  for 
himself  definite  prospects  for  a  forward  movement ; 
it  is  sufficient  to  say  of  this  layman's  effort,  that 
he  proposed  substantially  the  line  of  advance  which 
Johnston  a  little  later  began  to  dread  most ;  Lincoln's 
plan  was  submitted  for  McClellan's  consideration ; 
McClellan  rejected  it,  and  his  reasons  were  based  on  his 


288  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

assertion  that  he  would  have  to  meet  nearly  equal 
numbers.  He,  in  fact,  outnumbered  the  enemy  by 
more  than  three  to  .one.  If  we  find  the  President  later 
setting  aside  the  general's  judgment  on  grounds  that 
are  not  fully  explained,  we  must  recall  McClellan's 
vast  and  persistent  miscalculations  of  an  enemy  resident 
in  his  neighbourhood.  And  the  distrust  which  he  thus 
created  was  aggravated  by  another  propensity  of  his 
vague  mind.  His  illusory  fear  was  the  companion  of 
an  extravagant  hope ;  the  Confederate  army  was 
invincible  when  all  the  world  expected  him  to  attack 
it  th«n  and  there,  but  the  blow  which  he  would  deal  it 
in  his  own  place  and  his  own  time  was  to  have  decisive 
results,  which  were  indeed  impossible  ;  the  enemy  was 
to  "  pass  beneath  the  Caudine  Forks."  The  demands 
which  he  made  on  the  Administration  for  men  and 
supplies  seemed  to  have  no  finality  about  them  ;  his. 
tone  in  regard  to  them  seemed  to  degenerate  into  a 
chronic  grumble.  The  War  Department  certainly  did 
not  intend  to  stint  him  in  any  way  ;  but  he  was  an 
unsatisfactory  man  to  deal  with  in  these  matters.  There 
was  a  great  mystery  as  to  what  became  of  the  men  sent 
to  him.  In  the  idyllic  phrase,  which  Lincoln  once  used 
of  him  or  of  some  other  general,  sending  troops  to  him 
was  "  like  shifting  fleas  across  a  barn  floor  with  a  shovel 
— not  half  of  them  ever  get  there."  But  his  fault  was 
graver  than  this  ;  utterly  ignoring  the  needs  of  the 
West,  he  tried,  as  General-in-Chief,  to  divert  to  his  own 
army  the  recruits  and  the  stores  required  for  the  other 
armies. 

The  difficulty  with  him  went  yet  further  ;    McClellan 

himself   deliberately   set   to  work  to   destroy  personal 

harmony    between    himself    and    his    Government.     It 

\  counts  for  little  that  in  private  he  soon  set  down  all 

'  the  civil  authorities  as  the  "  greatest  set  of  incapables," 

and  so  forth,  but  it  counts  for  more  that  he  was  personally 

insolent  to  the  President.     Lincoln  had  been  in  the  habit, 

mistaken  in  this  case  but  natural  in  a  chief  who  desires 

to  be  friendly,  of  calling  at  McClellan's  house  rather  than 

summoning    him    to    his    own.     McClellan    acquired    a 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       289 

habit  of  avoiding  him,  he  treated  his  enquiries  as  idle 
curiosity,  and  he  probably  thought,  not  without  a  grain 
of  reason,  that  Lincoln's  way  of  discussing  matters  with 
many  people  led  him  into  indiscretion.  So  one  evening, 
when  Lincoln  and  Seward  were  waiting  at  the  general's 
house  for  his  return,  McClellan  came  in  and  went  up 
stairs  ;  a  message  was  sent  that  the  President  would  be 
glad  to  see  him  ;  he  said  he  was  tired  and  would  rather 
be  excused  that  night.  Lincoln  damped  down  his 
friends'  indignation  at  this  ;  he  would,  he  once  said, 
"  hold  General  McClellan' s  stirrup  for  him  if  he  will 
only  win  us  victories."  But  he  called  no  more  at 
McClellan's,  and  a  curious  abruptness  in  some  of  his 
orders  later  marks  his  unsuccessful  effort  to  deal  with 
McClellan  in  another  way.  The  slightly  ridiculous 
light  in  which  the  story  shows  Lincoln  would  not 
obscure  to  any  soldier  the  full  gravity  of  such  an 
incident.  It  was  not  merely  foolish  to  treat  a  kind 
superior  rudely ;  a  general  who  thus  drew  down  a 
curtain  between  his  own  mind  and  that  of  the  Govern 
ment  evidently  went  a  very  long  way  to  ensure  failure 
in  war. 

Lincoln  had  failed  to  move  McClellan  early  in 
December.  For  part  of  that  month  and  January 
McClellan  was  very  ill.  Consultations  were  held  with 
other  generals,  including  McDowell,  who  could  not  be 
given  the  chief  command  because  the  troops  did  not 
trust  him.  McDowell  and  the  rest  were  in  agreement 
with  Lincoln.  Then  McClellan  suddenly  recovered  and 
was  present  at  a  renewed  consultation.  He  snubbed 
McDowell ;  the  inadequacy  of  his  force  to  meet,  in  fact, 
less  than  a  third  of  its  number,  was  "  so  plain  that  a 
blind  man  could  see  it  "  ;  he  was  severely  and  abruptly 
tackled  as  to  his  own  plans  by  Secretary  Chase  ;  Lincoln 
intervened  to  shield  him,  got  from  him  a  distinct  state 
ment  that  he  had  in  his  mind  a  definite  time  for  moving, 
and  adjourned  the  meeting.  Stanton,  one  of  the  friends 
to  whom  McClellan  had  confided  his  grievances,  was 
now  at  the  War  Department  and  was  at  one  with  the 
Joint  Committee  of  Congress  in  his  impatience  that 


290  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

McClellan  should  move.  At  last,  on  January  27, 
Lincoln  published  a  "  General  War  Order  "  that  a  for 
ward  movement  was  to  be  made  by  the  army  of  the 
Potomac  and  the  Western  armies  on  February  22. 
It  seems  a  blundering  step,  but  it  roused  McClellan. 
For  a  time  he  even  thought  of  acting  as  Lincoln  wished  ; 
he  would  move  straight  against  Johnston,  and  "  in  ten 
days,"  he  told  Chase  on  February  13,  "I  shall  be  in 
Richmond."  But  he  quickly  returned  to  the  plan  which 
he  seems  to  have  been  forming  before  but  which  he  only 
now  revealed  to  the  Government,  and  it  was  a  plan 
which  involved  further  delay.  When  February  22 
passed  and  nothing  was  done,  the  Joint  Committee  were 
indignant  that  Lincoln  still  stood  by  McClellan.  But 
McClellan  now  was  proposing  definite  action  ;  apart 
from  the  difficulty  of  finding  a  better  man,  there  was 
the  fact  that  McClellan  had  made  his  army  and  was 
beloved  by  it ;  above  all,  Lincoln  had  not  lost  all  the 
belief  he  had  formed  at  first  in  McClellan's  capacity  ; 
he  believed  that  "  if  he  could  once  get  McClellan 
started "  he  would  do  well.  Professional  criticism, 
alive  to  McClellan's  military  faults,  has  justified  Lincoln 
in  this,  and  it  was  for  something  other  than  professional 
failure  that  Lincoln  at  last  removed  him. 

McClellan  had  determined  to  move  his  army  by  sea 
to  some  point  further  down  the  coast  of  the  Chesapeake 
Bay.  The  questions  which  Lincoln  wrote  to  him 
requesting  a  written  answer  have  never  been  adequately 
answered.  Did  McClellan's  plan,  he  asked,  require 
less  time  or  money  than  Lincoln's  ?  Did  it  make 
victory  more  certain  ?  Did  it  make  it  more  valuable  ? 
In  case  of  disaster,  did  it  make  retreat  more  easy  ?  The 
one  point  for  consideration  in  McClellan's  reply  to  him 
is  that  the  enemy  did  not  expect  such  a  movement. 
This  was  quite  true  ;  but  the  enemy  was  able  to  meet 
it,  and  McClellan  was  far  too  deliberate  to  reap  any 
advantage  from  a  surprise.  His  original  plan  was  to 
land  near  a  place  called  Urbana  on  the  estuary  of  the 
Rappahannock,  not  fifty  miles  east  of  Richmond.  When 
he  heard  that  Johnston  had  retreated  further  south,  he 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       291 

assumed,  and  ever  after  declared,  that  this  was  to 
anticipate  his  design  upon  Urbana,  which,  he  said,  must 
have  reached  the  enemy's  ears  through  the  loose 
chattering  of  the  Administration.  As  has  been  seen, 
this  was  quite  untrue.  His  project  of  going  to  Urbana 
was  now  changed,  by  himself  or  the  Government,  upon 
the  unanimous  advice  of  his  chief  subordinate  generals, 
into  a  movement  to  Fort  Monroe,  which  he  had  even 
before  regarded  as  preferable  to  a  direct  advance 
southwards.  A  few  days  after  Johnston's  retreat,  the 
War  Department  began  the  embarkation  of  his  troops 
for  this  point.  Fort  Monroe  is  at  the  end  of  the  peninsula 
which  lies  between  the  estuaries  of  the  York  River  on 
the  north  and  the  James  on  the  south.  Near  the  base 
of  this  projection  of  land,  seventy-five  miles  from 
Fort  Monroe,  stands  Richmond.  On  April  2,  1862, 
McClellan  himself  landed  to  begin  the  celebrated  Penin 
sula  Campaign  which  was  to  close  in  disappointment  at 
the  end  of  July. 

Before  the  troops  were  sent  to  the  Peninsula,  several 
things  were  to  be  done.  There  was  an  expedition  to 
restore  communication  westward  by  the  Ohio  railway. 
This  involved  bridging  the  Potomac  with  boats  which 
were  to  be  brought  by  canal.  It  collapsed  because 
McClellan's  boats  were  six  inches  too  wide  for  the  canal 
locks.  Then  Lincoln  had  insisted  that  the  navigation 
of  the  lower  Potomac  should  be  made  free  from  the 
menace  of  Confederate  batteries  which,  if  McClellan 
would  have  co-operated  with  the  Navy  Department, 
would  have  been  cleared  away  long  before.  This  was 
now  done,  and  though  a  new  peril  to  the  transportation 
of  McClellan's  army  suddenly  and  dramatically  disclosed 
itself,  it  was  as  suddenly  and  dramatically  removed. 
In  the  hasty  abandonment  of  Norfolk  harbour  on  the 
south  of  the  James  estuary  by  the  North,  a  screw 
steamer  called  the  Merrimac  had  been  partly  burnt  and 
scuttled  by  the  North.  On  March  I  she  steamed  out 
of  the  harbour  in  sight  of  the  North.  The  Confederates 
had  raised  her  and  converted  her  into  an  ironclad. 
Three  wooden  ships  of  the  North  gave  gallant  but  useless 


292  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

fight  to  her  and  were  destroyed  that  day  ;  and  the 
news  spread  consternation  in  every  Northern  port.  On 
the  very  next  morning  there  came  into  the  mouth  of  the 
James  the  rival  product  of  the  Northern  Navy  Depart 
ment  and  of  the  Swedish  engineer  Ericson's  invention. 
She  was  compared  to  a  "  cheesebox  on  a  raft  "  ;  she 
was  named  the  Monitor,  and  was  the  parent  of  a  type 
of  vessel  so  called  which  has  been  heard  of  much  more 
recently.  The  Merrimac  and  the  Monitor  forthwith 
fought  a  three  hours'  duel ;  then  each  retired  into 
harbour  without  fatal  damage.  But  the  Merrimac 
never  came  out  again  ;  she  was  destroyed  by  the 
Confederates  when  McClellan  had  advanced  some  way 
up  the  Peninsula  ;  and  it  will  be  unnecessary  to  speak 
of  the  several  similar  efforts  of  the  South,  which  nearly 
but  not  quite  achieved  very  important  successes  later. 

Before  and  after  his  arrival  at  the  Peninsula,  McClellan 
received  several  mortifications.  Immediately  after  the 
humiliation  of  the  enemy's  escape  from  Manassas,  he 
was  without  warning  relieved  of  his  command  as 
General-in-Chief.  This  would  in  any  case  have  followed 
naturally  upon  his  expedition  away  from  Washington  ; 
it  was  in  public  put  on  that  ground  alone  ;  and  he  took 
it  well.  He  had  been  urged  to  appoint  corps  com 
manders,  for  so  large  a  force  as  his  could  not  remain 
organised  only  in  divisions  ;  he  preferred  to  wait  till 
he  had  made  trial  of  the  generals  under  him  ;  Lincoln 
would  not  have  this  delay,  and  appointed  corps  com 
manders  chosen  by  himself  because  he  believed  them  to 
be  fighting  men.  The  manner  in  which  these  and  some 
other  preparatory  steps  were  taken  were,  without  a 
doubt,  intended  to  make  McClellan  feel  the  whip.  They 
mark  a  departure,  not  quite  happy  at  first,  from 
Lincoln's  formerly  too  gentle  manner.  A  worse  shock 
to  McClellan  followed.  The  President  had  been  em 
phatic  in  his  orders  that  a  sufficient  force  should  be  left 
to  make  Washington  safe,  and  supposed  that  he  had 
come  to  a  precise  understanding  on  this  point.  He 
suddenly  discovered  that  McClellan,  who  had  now 
left  for  Fort  Monroe,  had  ordered  McDowell  to  follow 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       293 

him  with  a  force  so  large  that  it  would  not  leave 
the  required  number  behind.  Lincoln  immediately 
ordered  McDowell  and  his  whole  corps  to  remain, 
though  he  subsequently  sent  a  part  of  it  to  McClellan. 
McClellan's  story  later  gives  reason  for  thinking  that  he 
had  intended  no  deception  ;  but  if  so,  he  had  expressed 
himself  with  unpardonable  vagueness,  and  he  had  not 
in  fact  left  Washington  secure.  Now  and  throughout 
this  campaign  Lincoln  took  the  line  that  Washington 
must  be  kept  safe — safe  in  the  judgment  of  all  the  best 
military  authorities  available. 

McClellan's  progress  up  the  Peninsula  was  slow.  He 
had  not  informed  himself  correctly  as  to  the  geography  ; 
he  found  the  enemy  not  so  unprepared  as  he  had 
supposed  ;  he  wasted,  it  is  agreed,  a  month  in  regular 
approaches  to  their  thinly-manned  fortifications  at 
Yorktown,  when  he  might  have  carried  them  by  assault. 
He  was  soon  confronted  by  Joseph  Johnston,  and  he 
seems  both  to  have  exaggerated  Johnston's  numbers 
again  and  to  have  been  unprepared  for  his  movements. 
The  Administration  does  not  seem  to  have  spared  any 
effort  to  support  him.  In  addition  to  the  100,000 
troops  he  took  with  him,  40,000  altogether  were  before 
long  despatched  to  him.  He  was  operating  in  a  very 
difficult  country,  but  he  was  opposed  at  first  by  not  half 
his  own  number.  Lincoln,  in  friendly  letters,  urged  upon 
him  that  delay  enabled  the  enemy  to  strengthen  himself 
both  in  numbers  and  in  fortifications.  Tire  War 
Department  did  its  best  for  him.  The  whole  of  his 
incessant  complaints  on  this  score  are  rendered  un 
convincing  by  the  language  of  his  private  letters  about 
that  "  sink  of  iniquity,  Washington,"  "  those  treacherous 
hounds,"  the  civil  authorities,  who  were  at  least  honest 
and  intelligent  men,  and  the  "  Abolitionists  and  other 
scoundrels,"  who,  he  supposed,  wished  the  destruction 
of  his  army.  The  criticism  in  Congress  of  himself  and 
his  generals  was  no  doubt  free,  but  so,  as  Lincoln 
reminded  him,  was  the  criticism  of  Lincoln  himself. 
Justly  or  not,  there  were  complaints  of  his  relations 
with  corps  commanders.  Lincoln  gave  no  weight  to 


294  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

them,  but  wrote  him  a  manly  and  a  kindly  warning. 
The  points  of  controversy  which  McClellan  bequeathed 
to  writers  on  the  Civil  War  are  innumerable,  but  no  one 
can  read  his  correspondence  at  this  stage  without 
concluding  that  he  was  almost  impossible  to  deal 
with,  and  that  the  whole  of  his  evidence  in  his  own  case 
was  vitiated  by  a  sheer  hallucination  that  people  wished 
him  to  fail.  He  had  been  nearly  two  months  in  the 
Peninsula  when  he  was  attacked  at  a  disadvantage  by 
Johnston,  but  defeated  him  on  May  31  and  June  I 
in  a  battle  which  gave  confidence  and  prestige  to  the 
Northern  side,  but  which  he  did  not  follow  up.  A  part 
of  his  army  pursued  the  enemy  to  within  four  miles  of 
Richmond,  and  it  has  been  contended  that  if  he  had 
acted  with  energy  he  could  at  this  time  have  taken  that 
city.  His  delay,  to  whatever  it  was  due,  gave  the 
enemy  time  to  strengthen  himself  greatly  both  in  men 
and  in  fortifications.  The  capable  Johnston  was  severely 
wounded  in  the  battle,  and  was  replaced  by  the  inspired 
Lee.  According  to  McClellan's  own  account,  which 
English  writers  have  followed,  his  movements  had 
been  greatly  embarrassed  by  the  false  hope  given  him 
that  McDowell  was  now  to  march  overland  and  join 
him.  His  statement  that  he  was  influenced  by  this  is 
refuted  by  his  own  letters  at  the  time.  McClellan, 
however,  suffered  a  great  disappointment.  The  front 
of  Washington  was  now  clear  of  the  enemy  and  Lincoln 
had  determined  to  send  McDowell  when  he  was  induced 
to  keep  him  back  by  a  diversion  in  the  war  which  he 
had  not  expected,  and  which  indeed  McClellan  had 
advised  him  not  to  expect. 

"  Stonewall  "  Jackson's  most  famous  campaign  hap 
pened  at  this  juncture,  and  to  save  Washington,  Lincoln 
and  Stanton  placed  themselves,  or  were  placed,  in  the 
trying  position  of  actually  directing  movements  of 
troops.  There  were  to  the  south  and  south-west  of 
Washington,  besides  the  troops  under  McDowell's 
command,  two  Northern  forces  respectively  commanded 
by  Generals  Banks  and  Fremont.  These  two  men  were 
among  the  chief  examples  of  those  "  political  generals," 


THE  DISASTERS  OF   THE  NORTH       295 

the  use  of  whom  in  this  early  and  necessarily  blundering 
stage  of  the  war,  has  been  the  subject  of  much  comment. 
Banks  was  certainly  a  politician,  a  self-made  man,  who 
had  worked  in  a  factory  and  who  had  risen  to  be  at  one 
time  Speaker  of  the  House.  He  was  now  a  general 
because  as  a  powerful  man  in  the  patriotic  State  of 
Massachusetts  he  brought  with  him  many  men,  and 
these  were  ready  to  obey  him.  On  the  other  hand, 
he  on  several  occasions  showed  good  judgment  both  in 
military  matters  and  in  the  questions  of  civil  adminis 
tration  which  came  under  him ;  his  heart  was  in  his 
duty  ;  and,  though  he  held  high  commands  almost  to  the 
end  of  the  war,  want  of  competence  was  never  imputed 
to  him  till  the  failure  of  a  very  difficult  enterprise  on 
which  he  was  despatched  in  1864.  He  was  now  in  the 
lower  valley  of  the  Shenandoah,  keeping  a  watch  over  a 
much  smaller  force  under  Jackson  higher  up  the  valley. 
Fremont  was  in  some  sense  a  soldier,  but  after  his  record  in 
Missouri  he  should  never  have  been  employed.  His  new 
appointment  was  one  of  Lincoln's  greatest  mistakes,  and 
it  was  a  mistake  of  a  characteristic  kind.  It  will  easily  be 
understood  that  there  were  real  political  reasons  for  not 
leaving  this  popular  champion  of  freedom  unused  and 
unrecognised.  These  reasons  should  not  have,  and 
probably  would  not  have,  prevailed.  But  Lincoln's 
personal  reluctance  to  resist  all  entreaties  on  behalf  of 
his  own  forerunner  and  his  own  rival  was  great ;  and 
then  Fremont  came  to  Lincoln  and  proposed  to  him  a 
knight-errant's  adventure  to  succour  the  oppressed 
Unionists  of  Tennessee  by  an  expedition  through  West 
Virginia.  So  he  was  now  to  proceed  there,  but  was  kept 
for  the  present  in  the  mountains  near  the  Shenandoah 
valley.  The  way  in  which  the  forces  under  McDowell, 
Banks  and  Fremont  were  scattered  on  various  errands 
was  unscientific ;  what  could  be  done  by  Jackson, 
in  correspondence  with  Lee,  was  certainly  unforeseen. 
At  the  beginning  of  May,  Jackson,  who  earlier  in  the 
spring  had  achieved  some  minor  successes  in  the 
Shenandoah  valley  and  had  raided  West  Virginia,  began 
a  series  of  movements  of  which  the  brilliant  skill  and 


296  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

daring  are  recorded  in  Colonel  Henderson's  famous 
book.  With  a  small  force,  surrounded  by  other  forces, 
each  of  which,  if  concentrated,  should  have  outnumbered 
him,  he  caught  each  in  turn  at  a  disadvantage,  inflicted 
on  them  several  damaging  blows,  and  put  the  startled 
President  and  Secretary  of  War  in  fear  for  the  safety 
of  Washington.  There  seemed  to  be  no  one  available 
who  could  immediately  be  charged  with  the  supreme 
command  of  these  three  Northern  forces,  unless  McDowell 
could  have  been  spared  from  where  jhe  was  ;  so  Lincoln 
with  Stanton's  help  took  upon  himself  to  ensure  the 
co-operation  of  their  three  commanders  by  orders  from 
Washington.  His  self-reliance  had  now  begun  to  reach 
its  full  stature,  his  military  good  sense  in  comparison 
with  McClellan's  was  proving  greater  than  he  had 
supposed,  and  he  had  probably  not  discovered  its 
limitations.  Presumably  his  plans  now  were,  like  an 
amateur's,  too  complicated,  and  it  is  not  worth  while 
to  discuss  them.  But  he  was  trying  to  cope  with  newly 
revealed  military  genius,  and,  so  far  as  can  be  told,  he 
was  only  prevented  from  crushing  the  adventurous 
Jackson  by  a  piece  of  flat  disobedience  on  the  part  of 
Fremont.  Fremont  having  thus  appropriately  punished 
Lincoln,  was  removed,  this  time  finally,  from  command. 
Jackson,  having  successfully  kept  McDowell  from 
McClellan,  had  before  the  end  of  June  escaped  safe 
southward.  McClellan  was  nearing  Richmond.  Lee, 
by  this  time,  had  been  set  free  from  Jefferson  Davis' 
office  and  had  taken  over  the  command  of  Joseph 
Johnston's  army.  Lincoln  must  have  learnt  a  great 
deal,  and  he  fully  realised  that  the  forces  not  under 
McClellan  in  the  East  should  be  under  some  single  com 
mander.  Pope,  an  experienced  soldier,  had  succeeded 
well  in  the  West ;  he  was  no  longer  necessary  there,  and 
there  was  no  adverse  criticism  upon  him.  He  was  in 
all  respects  a  proper  choice,  and  he  was  now  summoned 
to  take  command  of  what  was  to  be  called  the  army  of 
Virginia.  A  few  days  later,  upon  the  advice,  as  it 
seems  of  Scott,  Halleck  himself  was  called  from  the 
West.  His  old  command  was  left  to  Grant  and  he 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       297 

himself  was  made  General-in-Chief,  and  continued  at 
Washington  to  the  end  of  the  war  as  an  adviser  of  the 
Government.  All  the  progress  in  the  West  had  been 
made  under  Halleck's  supervision,  and  his  despatches  had 
given  an  exaggerated  impression  of  his  own  achievement 
at  Corinth.  He  had  not  seen  active  service  before  the  war, 
but  he  had  a  great  name  as  an  accomplished  military 
writer  ;  in  after  years  he  was  well  known  as  a  writer  on 
international  law.  He  is  not  thought  to  have  justified 
his  appointment  by  showing  sound  judgment  about  war, 
and  Lincoln  upon  some  later  emergency  told  him  in  his 
direct  way  that  his  military  knowledge  was  useless  if 
he  could  not  give  a  definite  decision  in  doubtful  cir 
cumstances.  But  whether  Halleck's  abilities  were  great 
or  small,  Lincoln  continued  to  use  them,  because  he 
found  him  "  wholly  for  the  service,"  without  personal 
favour  or  prejudice. 

McClellan  was  slowly  but  steadily  nearing  Rich 
mond.  From  June  26  to  July  2  there  took  place  a 
series  of  engagements  between  Lee  and  McClellan,  or 
rather  the  commanders  under  him,  known  as  the 
Seven  Days'  Battles.  The  fortunes  of  the  fighting 
varied  greatly,  but  the  upshot  is  that,  though  the  corps 
on  McClellan's  left  won  a  strong  position  not  far  from 
Richmond,  the  sudden  approach  of  Jackson's  forces 
upon  McClellan's  right  flank,  which  began  on  the  26th, 
placed  him  in  what  appears  to  have  been,  as  he  himself 
thought  it,  a  situation  of  great  danger.  Lee  is  said 
to  have  "  read  McClellan  like  an  open  book,"  playing 
upon  his  caution  which  made  him,  while  his  subordinates 
fought,  more  anxious  to  secure  their  retreat  than  to 
seize  upon  any  advantage  they  gained.  But  Lee's 
reading  deceived  him  in  one  respect.  He  had  counted 
upon  McClellan's  retreating,  but  thought  he  would 
retreat  under  difficulties  right  down  the  Peninsula  to 
his  original  base  and  be  thoroughly  cut  up  on  the 
way.  But  on  July  2  McClellan  with  great  skill  with 
drew  his  whole  army  to  Harrison's  Landing  far  up 
the  James  estuary,  having  effected  with  the  Navy 
a  complete  transference  of  his  base.  Here  his  army 


298  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

lay  in  a  position  of  security  ;  they  might  yet  threaten 
Richmond,  and  McClellan's  soldiers  still  believed  in 
him.  But  the  South  was  led  by  a  great  commander 
and  had  now  learned  to  give  him  unbounded  confidence  ; 
there  was  some  excuse  for  a  panic  in  Wall  Street,  and 
every  reason  for  dejection  in  the  North. 

On  the  third  of  the  Seven  Days,  McClellan,  much 
moved  by  the  sight  of  dead  and  wounded  comrades, 
sent  a  gloomy  telegram  to  the  Secretary  of  War,  appeal 
ing  with  excessive  eloquence  for  more  men.  "  I  only 
wish  to  say  to  the  President,"  he  remarked  in  it,  "  that 
I  think  he  is  wrong  in  regarding  me  as  ungenerous  when 
I  said  that  my  force  was  too  weak."  He  concluded : 
"  If  I  save  the  army  now,  I  tell  you  plainly  that  I  owe 
no  thanks  to  you  nor  to  any  other  persons  in  Washington. 
You  have  done  your  best  to  sacrifice  this  army." 
Stanton  still  expressed  the  extraordinary  hope  that 

A  Richmond  would  fall  in  a  day  or  two.  He  had  lately 
committed  the  folly  of  suspending  enlistment,  an  act 
which,  though  of  course  there  is  an  explanation  of  it, 
must  rank  as  the  one  first-rate  blunder  of  Lincoln's 
Administration.  He  was  now  negotiating  through  the 
astute  Seward  for  offers  from  the  State  Governors  of  a 
levy  of  300,000  men  to  follow  up  McClellan's  success. 
Lincoln,  as  was  his  way,  feared  the  worst.  He  seems 
at  one  moment  to  have  had  fears  for  McClellan's 
sanity.  But  he  telegraphed,  himself,  an  answer  to  him, 
which  affords  as  fair  an  example  as  can  be  given  of  his 

/  characteristic  manner.  "  Save  your  army  at  all  events. 
Will  send  reinforcements  as  fast  as  we  can.  Of  course 
they  cannot  reach  you  to-day  or  to-morrow,  or  next  day. 
I  have  not  said  you  were  ungenerous  for  saying  you 
needed  reinforcements.  I  thought  you  were  ungenerous 
in  assuming  that  I  did  not  send  them  as  fast  as  I  could. 
I  feel  any  misfortune  to  you  and  your  army  quite  as 
keenly  as  you  feel  it  yourself.  If  you  have  had-  a  drawn 
battle  or  repulse,  it  is  the  price  we  pay  for  the  enemy 
not  being  in  Washington.  We  protected  Washington 
and  the  enemy  concentrated  on  you.  Had  we  stripped 
Washington,  he  would  have  been  upon  us  before  the 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       299 

troops  could  have  gotten  to  you.  Less  than  a  week 
ago  you  notified  us  reinforcements  were  leaving  Rich 
mond  to  come  in  front  of  us.  It  is  the  nature  of  the 
case,  and  neither  you  nor  the  Government  are  to  blame. 
Please  tell  me  at  once  the  present  condition  and  aspect 
of  things." 

Demands  for  an  impossible  number  of  reinforcements 
continued.  Lincoln  explained  to  McClellan  a  few  days 
later  that  they  were  impossible,  and  added  :  "  If  in 
your  frequent  mention  of  responsibility  you  have  the 
impression  that  I  blame  you  for  not  doing  more  than 
you  can,  please  be  relieved  of  such  an  impression.  I 
only  beg  that,  in  like  manner,  you  will  not  ask  im 
possibilities  of  me."  Much  argument  upon  Lincoln's 
next  important  act  may  be  saved  by  the  simple  ob 
servations  that  the  problem  in  regard  to  the  defence  of 
Washington  was  real,  that  McClellan's  propensity  to 
ask  for  the  impossible  was  also  real,  and  that  Lincoln's 
patient  and  loyal  attitude  to  him  was  real  too. 

Five  days  after  his  arrival  at  Harrison's  Landing, 
McClellan  wrote  Lincoln  a  long  letter.  It  was  a  treatise 
upon  Lincoln's  political  duties.  It  was  written  as 
"  on  the  brink  of  eternity."  He  was  not  then  in  fact  in 
any  danger,  and  possibly  he  had  composed  it  seven  days 
before  as  his  political  testament ;  and  apprehensions, 
free  from  personal  fear,  excuse,  without  quite  redeeming, 
its  inappropriateness.  The  President  is  before  all 
things  not  to  abandon  the  cause.  But  the  cause  should 
be  fought  for  upon  Christian  principles.  Christian 
principles  exclude  warfare  on  private  property.  More 
especially  do  they  exclude  measures  for  emancipating 
slaves.  And  if  the  President  gives  way  to  radical  views 
on  slavery,  he  will  get  no  soldiers.  Then  follows  a 
mandate  to  the  President  to  appoint  a  Commander-in- 
Chief,  not  necessarily  the  writer.  Such  a  summary 
does  injustice  to  a  certain  elevation  of  tone  in  the  letter, 
but  that  elevation  is  itself  slightly  strained.  McClellan, 
whatever  his  private  opinions,  had  not  meddled  with 
politics  before  he  left  Washington.  The  question  why 
in  this  military  crisis  he  should  have  written  what  a 


300  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Democratic  politician  might  have  composed  as  a  party 
manifesto  must  later  have  caused  Lincoln  some  thought, 
but  it  apparently  did  not  enter  into  the  decision  he  next 
took.  He  arrived  himself  at  Harrison's  Landing  next  day. 
McClellan  handed  him  the  letter.  Lincoln  read  it,  and 
said  that  he  was  obliged  to  him.  McClellan  sent  a  copy 
to  his  wife  as  "  a  very  important  record." 

Lincoln  had  come  in  order  to  learn  the  views  of 
McClellan  and  all  his  corps  commanders.  They  differed 
a  good  deal  on  important  points,  but  a  majority  of 
them  were  naturally  anxious  to  stay  and  fight  there. 
Lincoln  was  left  in  some  anxiety  as  to  how  the  .health 
of  the  troops  would  stand  the  climate  of  the  coming 
months  if  they  had  to  wait  long  where  they  were.  He 
was  also  disturbed  by  McClellan's  vagueness  about  the 
number  of  his  men,  for  he  now  returned  as  present  for 
duty  a  number  which  far  exceeded  that  which  some  of  his 
recent  telegrams  had  given  and  yet  fell  short  of  the 
number  sent  him  by  an  amount  which  no  reasonable  esti 
mate  of  killed,  wounded,  and  sick  could  explain.  This 
added  to  Lincoln's  doubt  on  the  main  question  presented 
to  him.  McClellan  believed  that  he  could  take  Richmond, 
but  he  demanded  for  this  very  large  reinforcements. 
Some  part  of  them  were  already  being  collected,  but  the 
rest  could  by  no  means  be  given  him  without  leaving 
Washington  with  far  fewer  troops  to  defend  it  than 
McClellan  or  anybody  else  had  hitherto  thought 
necessary. 

On  -July  24,  the  day  after  his  arrival  at  Washington, 
Halleck  was  sent  to  consult  with  McClellan  and  his 
generals.  The  record  of  their  consultations  sufficiently 
shows  the  intricacy  of  the  problem  to  be  decided.  The 
question  of  the  health  of  the  climate  in  August  weighed 
much  with  Halleck,  but  the  most  striking  feature  of 
their  conversation  was  the  fluctuation  of  McClellan's 
own  opinion  upon  each  important  point — at  one  moment 
he  even  gave  Halleck  the  impression  that  he  wished  under 
all  the  circumstances  to  withdraw  and  to  join  Pope. 
When  Halleck  returned  to  Washington  McClellan 
telegraphed  in  passionate  anxiety  to  be  left  in  the 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       301 

Peninsula  and  reinforced.  On  the  other  hand,  some  of 
the  officers  of  highest  rank  with  him  wrote  strongly 
urging  withdrawal.  This  latter  was  the  course  on  which 
Lincoln  and  Halleck  decided.  In  the  circumstances  it 
was  certainly  the  simplest  course  to  concentrate  all 
available  forces  in  an  attack  upon  the  enemy  from  the 
direction  of  Washington  which  would  keep  that  capital 
covered  all  the  while.  It  was  in  any  case  no  hasty  and 
no  indefensible  decision,  nor  is  there  any  justification 
for  the  frequent  assertion  that  some  malignant  influence 
brought  it  about.  It  is  one  of  the  steps  taken  by 
Lincoln  which  have  been  the  most  often  lamented.  But 
if  McClellan  had  had  all  he  demanded  to  take  Richmond 
and  had  made  good  his  promise,  what  would  Lee  have 
done  ?  Lee's  own  answer  to  a  similar  question  later 
was,  "  We  would  swap  queens  "  ;  that  is,  he  would  have 
taken  Washington.  If  so  the  Confederacy  would  not 
have  fallen,  but  in  all  probability  the  North  would  have 
collapsed,  and  European  Powers  would  at  the  least  have 
recognised  the  Confederacy. 

Lincoln  indeed  had  acted  as  any  prudent  civilian 
Minister  would  then  have  acted.  But  disaster  followed, 
or  rather  there  followed,  with  brief  interruption,  a 
succession  of  disasters  which,  after  this  long  tale  of 
hesitation,  can  be  quickly  told.  It  would  be  easy  to 
represent  them  as  a  judgment  upon  the  Administration 
which  had  rejected  the  guidance  of  McClellan.  But  in 
the  true  perspective  of  the  war,  the  point  which  has  now 
been  reached  marks  the  final  election  by  the  North  of 
the  policy  by  which  it  won  the  war.  McClellan,  even  if 
he  had  taken  Richmond  while  Washington  remained 
safe,  would  have  concentrated  the  efforts  of  the  North 
upon  a  line  of  advance  which  gave  little  promise  of 
finally  reducing  the  Confederacy.  It  is  evident  to-day 
that  the  right  course  for  the  North  was  to  keep  the 
threatening  of  Richmond  and  the  recurrent  hammering 
at  the  Southern  forces  on  that  front  duly  related  to 
that  continual  process  by  which  the  vitals  of  the 
Southern  country  were  being  eaten  into  from  the  west. 
This  policy,  it  has  been  seen,  was  present  to  Lincoln's 


302  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

mind  from  an  early  day ;  the  temptation  to  depart  from 
it  was  now  once  for  all  rejected.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
three  great  Southern  victories,  the  second  battle  of 
Bull  Run,  Fredericksburg,  and  Chancellors ville,  which 
followed  within  the  next  nine  months,  had  no  lasting 
influence.  Jefferson  Davis  might  perhaps  have  done 
well  if  he  had  neglected  all  else  and  massed  every  man 
he  could  gather  to  pursue  the  advantage  which'  these 
battles  gave  him.  He  did  not — perhaps  could  not— do 
this.  But  he  concentrated  his  greatest  resource  of  all, 
the  genius  of  Lee,  upon  a  point  at  which  the  real  danger 
did  not  lie. 

Pope  had  now  set  vigorously  to  work  collecting  and 
pulling  together  his  forces,  which  had  previously  been 
scattered  under  different  commanders  in  the  north  of 
Virginia.  He  was  guilty  of  a  General  Order  which 
shocked  people  by  its  boastfulness,  insulted  the  Eastern 
soldiers  by_a  comparison  with  their  Western  comrades, 
and  threatened  harsh  and  most  unjust  treatment  of  the 
civil  population  of  Virginia.  But  upon  the  whole  he 
created  confidence,  for  he  was  an  officer  well  trained  in 
his  profession  as  well  as  an  energetic  man.  The  problem 
was  now  to  effect  as  quickly  as  possible  the  union  of 
Pope's  troops  and  McClellan's  in  an  overwhelming  force. 
Pope  was  anxious  to  keep  McClellan  unmolested  while 
he  embarked  his  men.  So,  to  occupy  the  enemy,  he 
pushed  boldly  into  Virginia  ;  he  pushed  too  far,  placed 
himself  in  great  danger  from  the  lightning  movements 
which  Lee  now  habitually  employed  Jackson  to  execute, 
but  extricated  himself  with  much  promptitude,  though 
with  some  considerable  losses.  McClellan  had  not  been 
deprived  of  command  ;  he  was  in  the  curious  and 
annoying  position  of  having  to  transfer  troops  to  Pope 
till,  for  a  moment,  not  a  man  remained  under  him,  but 
the  process  of  embarking  and  transferring  them  gave  full 
scope  for  energy  and  skill.  McClellan,  as  it  appeared 
to  Lincoln,  performed  his  task  very  slowly.  This  was 
not  the  judgment  of  impatience,  for  McClellan  caused 
the  delay  by  repeated  and  perverse  disobedience  to 
Halleck's  orders.  But  the  day  drew  near  when  150,000 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       303 

men  might  be  concentrated  under  Pope  against  Lee's 
55,000.  The  stroke  which  Lee  now  struck  after  earnest 
consultation  with  Jackson  has  been  said  to  have  been 
"  perhaps  the  most  daring  in  the  history  of  warfare." 
He  divided  his  army  almost  under  the  enemy's  eyes  and 
sent  Jackson  by  a  circuitous  route  to  cut  Pope's 
communications  with  Washington.  Then  followed  an 
intricate  tactical  game,  in  which  each  side  was  bewildered 
as  to  the  movements  of  the  other.  Pope  became  ex 
asperated  and  abandoned  his  prudence.  He  turned  on 
his  enemy  when  he  should  and  could  have  withdrawn 
to  a  safe  position  and  waited.  On  August  29  and  30, 
in  the  ominous  neighbourhood  of  the  Bull  Run  and 
of  Manassas,  he  sustained  a  heavy  defeat.  Then  he 
abandoned  hope  before  he  need  have  done  so,  and, 
alleging  that  his  men  were  demoralised,  begged  to  be 
withdrawn  within  the  defences  of  Washington,  where 
he  arrived  on  September  3,  and,  as  was  inevitable  in 
the  condition  of  his  army,  was  relieved  of  his  command. 
McClellan,  in  Lincoln's  opinion,  had  now  been  guilty  of 
the  olrence  which  that  generous  mind  would  find  it 
hardest  to  forgive.  He  had  not  bestirred  himself  to 
get  his  men  to  Pope.  In  Lincoln's  belief  at  the  time 
he  had  wished  Pope  to  fail.  McClellan,  who  reached 
Washington  at  the  crisis  of  Pope's  difficulties,  was  con 
sulted,  and  said  to  Lincoln  that  Pope  must  be  left  to 
get  out  of  his  scrape  as  best  he  could.  It  was  perhaps 
only  an  awkward  phrase,  but  it  did  not  soften  Lincoln. 
Washington  was  now  too  strongly  held  to  be  attacked, 
but  Lee  determined  to  invade  Maryland.  At  least  this 
would  keep  Virginia  safe  during  harvest  time.  It  might 
win  him  many  recruits  in  Maryland.  It  would  frighten 
the  North,  all  the  more  because  a  Confederate  force 
further  west  was  at  that  same  time  invading  Kentucky  ; 
it  might  accomplish  there  was  no  saying  how  much. 
This  much,  one  may  gather  from  the  "  Life  of  Lord 
John  Russell,"  any  great  victory  of  the  South  on 
Northern  soil  would  probably  have  accomplished  :  the 
Confederacy  would  have  been  recognised,  as  Jefferson 
Davis  longed  for  it  to  be,  by  European  Powers.  Lincoln 


304  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

now  acted  in  total  disregard  of  his  Cabinet  and  of  all 
Washington,  and  in  equal  disregard  of  any  false  notions 
of  dignity.  By  word  of  mouth  he  directed  McClellan 
to  take  command  of  all  the  troops  at  Washington.  His 
opinion  of  McClellan  had  not  altered,  but,  as  he  said  to 
his  private  secretaries,  if  McClellan  could  not  fight  himself, 
he  excelled  in  making  others  ready  to  fight.  No  other 
step  could  have  succeeded  so  quickly  in  restoring  order 
and  confidence  to  the  Army.  Few  or  no  instructions 
were  given  to  McClellan.  He  was  simply  allowed  the 
freest  possible  hand,  and  was  watched  with  keen  solici 
tude  as  to  how  he  would  rise  to  his  opportunity. 

Lee,  in  his  advance,  expected  his  opponent  to  be  slow. 
He  actually  again  divided  his  small  army,  leaving 
Jackson  with  a  part  of  it  behind  for  a  while  to  capture, 
as  he  did,  the  Northern  fort  at  Harper's  Ferry.  A 
Northern  private  picked  up  a  packet  of  cigars  dropped 
by  some  Southern  officer  with  a  piece  of  paper  round  it. 
The  paper  was  a  copy  of  an  order  of  Lee's  which  revealed 
to  McClellan  the  opportunity  now  given  him  of  crushing 
Lee  in  detail.  But  he  did  not  rouse  himself.  He  was 
somewhat  hampered  by  lack  of  cavalry,  and  his  greatest 
quality  in  the  field  was  his  care  not  to  give  chances  to 
the  enemy.  His  want  of  energy  allowed  Lee  time  to 
discover  what  had  happened  and  fall  back  a  little  towards 
Harper's  Ferry.  Yet  Lee  dared,  without  having  yet 
reunited  his  forces,  to  stop  at  a  point  where  McClellan 
must  be  tempted  to  give  him  battle,  and  where,  if  he 
could  only  stand  against  McClellan,  Jackson  would  be 
in  a  position  to  deliver  a  deadly  counterstroke.  Lee 
knew  that  for  the  South  the  chance  of  rapid  success  was 
worth  any  risk.  McClellan,  however,  moved  so  slowly 
that  Jackson  .was  able  to  join  Lee  before  the  battle. 
The  Northern  army  came  up  with  them  near  the  north 
bank  of  the  Potomac  on  the  Antietam  Creek,  a  small 
tributary  of  that  river,  about  sixty  miles  north-east  of 
Washington.  There,  on  September  17,  1862,  McClellan 
ordered  an  attack,  to  which  he  did  not  attempt  to  give 
his  personal  direction.  His  corps  commanders  led 
assaults  on  Lee's  position  at  different  times  and  in  so 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       305 

disconnected  a  manner  that  each  was  repulsed  singly. 
But  on  the  following  morning  Lee  found  himself  in  a 
situation  which  determined  him  to  retreat. 

As  a  military  success  the  battle  of  Antietam  demanded 
to  be  followed  up.  Reinforcements  had  now  come  to 
McClellan,  and  Lincoln  telegraphed,  "  Please  do  not 
let  him  get  off  without  being  hurt."  Lee  was  between 
the  broad  Potomac  and  a  Northern  army  fully  twice  as 
large  as  his  own  with  other  large  forces  near.  McClellan's 
subordinates  urged  him  to  renew  the  attack  and  drive 
Lee  into  the  river.  But  Lee  was  allowed  to  cross  the 
river,  and  McClellan  lay  camped  on  the  Antietam  battle 
field  for  a  fortnight.  He  may  have  been  dissatisfied 
with  the  condition  of  his  army  and  its  supplies.  Some 
of  his  men  wanted  new  boots ;  many  of  Lee's  were 
limping  barefoot.  He  certainly,  as  often  before,  ex 
aggerated  the  strength  of  his  enemy.  Lee  recrossed  the 
Potomac  little  damaged.  Lincoln,  occupied  in  those 
days  over  the  most  momentous  act  of  his  political  life, 
watched  McClellan  eagerly,  and  came  to  the  Antietam 
to  see  things  for  himself.  He  came  back  in  the  full 
belief  that  McClellan  would  move  at  once.  Once  more 
undeceived,  he  pressed  him  with  letters  and  telegrams 
from  himself  and  Halleck.  He  was  convinced  that 
McClellan,  if  he  tried,  could  cut  off  Lee  from  Richmond. 
Hearing  of  the  fatigue  of  McClellan's  horses,  he  tele 
graphed  about  the  middle  of  October,  "  Will  you  pardon 
me  for  asking  what  your  horses  have  done  since  the 
battle  of  Antietam  that  tires  anything."  This  was 
unkind ;  McClellan  indeed  should  have  seen  about 
cavalry  in  the  days  when  he  was  organising  in  Washing 
ton,  but  at  this  moment  the  Southern  horse  had  just 
raided  right  round  his  lines  and  got  safe  back,  and  his 
own  much  inferior  cavalry  was  probably  worn  out  with 
vain  pursuit  of  them.  On  the  same  day  Lincoln 
wrote  more  kindly,  "  My  dear  Sir,  you  remember  my 
speaking  to  you  of  what  I  called  your  over-cautiousness. 
Are  you  not  over-cautiotis  wtj.en  you  assume  that  you 
cannot  do  what  the  enemy  is  constantly  doing  ?  Change 
positions  with  the  enemy,  "and  think  you  not,  he  would 


306  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

break  your  communications  with  Richmond  within  the 
next  twenty-four  hours."  And  after  a  brief^  analysis 
of  the  situation,  which  seems  conclusive,  he  ends : 
"  I  say  ( try '  ;  if  we  never  try  we  shall  never  succeed. 
...  If  we  cannot  beat  him  now  when  he  bears  the 
wastage  of  coming  to  us,  we  never  can  when  we  bear 
the  wastage  of  going  to  him."  His  patience  was  nearing 
a  limit  which  he  had  already  fixed  in  his  own  mind. 
On  October  28,  more  than  five  weeks  after  the  battle, 
McClellan  began  to  cross  the  Potomac,  and  took  a 
week  in  the  process.  On  November  5,  McClellan 
was  removed  from  his  command,  and  General  Burnside 
appointed  in  his  place. 

Lincoln  had  longed  for  the  clear  victory  that  he  thought 

McClellan  would  win  ;    he  gloomily  foreboded  that  he 

might  not  find  a  better  man  to  put  in  his  place  ;  he  felt 

sadly  how  he  would  be  accused,  as  he  has  been  ever 

since,  of  displacing  McClellan  because  he  was  a  Democrat. 

"  In  considering  military  merit,"  he  wrote  privately, 

"  the  world  has  abundant  evidence  that  I   disregard 

politics."     A  friend,   a   Republican  general,   wrote  to 

him  a  week  or  so  after  McClellan  had  been  removed  to 

urge  that  all  the  generals  ought  to  be  men  in  thorough 

sympathy   with    the   Administration.     He   received   a 

crushing  reply  (to  be  followed  in  a  day  or  two  by  a 

friendly  invitation)  indignantly  proving  that  Democrats 

served  as  well  in  the  field  as   Republicans.     But  in 

regard  to  McClellan  himself  we  now  know  that  a  grave 

suspicion    had    entered    Lincoln's    mind.     He    might 

perhaps,   in   the  fear   of  finding  no   one   better,   have 

tolerated  his   "  over-cautiousness  "  ;    he   did  not  care 

what  line  an  officer  who  did  his  duty  might  in  civil  life 

take  politically ;    but  he  would  not  take  the  risk  of 

entrusting  the  war  further  to  a  general  who  let  his 

politics   govern  his   strategy,   and  who,   as  he  put   it 

simply,  "  did  not  want  to  hurt  the  enemy."     This,  he 

had  begun  to  believe,  was  the  cause  of  McClellan's  lack 

of  energy.     He  reserved  to  treat  McClellan's  conduct 

now,  in  fighting  Lee  or  in  letting  him  escape  South,  as 

the .  test  of  whether  his  own  suspicion  about  him  was 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       307 

justified  or  not.  Lee  did  get  clear  away,  and  Lincoln 
dismissed  McClellan  in  the  full  belief,  right  or  wrong, 
that  he  was  not  sorry  for  Lee's  escape. 

It  is  not  known  exactly  what  further  evidence  Lincoln 
then  had  for  his  belief,  but  information  which  seems  to 
have  come  later  made  him  think  afterwards  that  he 
had  been  right.  The  following  story  was  told  him  by 
the  Governor  of  Vermont,  whose  brother,  a  certain 
General  Smith,  served  under  McClellan  and  was  long  his 
intimate  friend.  Lincoln  believed  the  story ;  so  may 
we.  The  Mayor  of  New  York,  a  shifty  demagogue 
named  Fernando  Wood,  had  visited  McClellan  in  the 
Peninsula  with  a  proposal  that  he  should  become  the 
Democratic  candidate  for  the  Presidency,  and  with  a 
view  to  this  should  pledge  himself  to  certain  Democratic 
politicians  to  conduct  the  war  in  a  way  that  should 
conciliate  the  South,  which  to  Lincoln's  mind  meant  an 
"  inefficient "  way.  McClellan,  after  some  days  of 
unusual  reserve,  told  Smith  of  this  and  showed  him  a 
letter  which  he  had  drafted  giving  the  desired  pledge. 
On  Smith's  earnest  remonstrance  that  this  "  looked 
like  treason,"  he  did  not  send  the  letter  then.  But 
Wood  came  again  after  the  battle  of  Antietam,  and  this 
time  McClellan  sent  a  letter  in  the  same  sense.  This  he 
afterwards  confessed  to  Smith,  showing  him  a  copy  of  the 
letter.  Smith  and  other  generals  asked,  after  this,  to  be 
relieved  from  service  under  him.  If,  as  can  hardly  be 
doubted,  McClellan  did  this,  there  can  be  no  serious 
excuse  for  him,  and  no  serious  question  that  Lincoln 
was  right  when  he  concluded  it  was  unsafe  to  employ 
him.  McClellan,  according  to  all  evidence  except  his 
own  letters,  was  a  nice  man,  and  was  not  likely  to 
harbour  a  thought  of  what  to  him  seemed  treason  ;  it 
is  honourable  to  him  that  he  wished  later  to  serve  under 
Grant  but  was  refused  by  him.  But,  to  one  of  his 
views,  the  political  situation  before  and  after  Antietam 
was  alarming,  and  it  is  certain  that  to  his  inconclusive 
mind  and  character  an  attitude  of  half  loyalty  would  be 
easy.  He  may  not  have  wished  that  Lee  should  escape, 
but  he  had  no  ardent  desire  that  he  should  not.  Right 


3o8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

or  wrong,  such  was  the  ground  of  Lincoln's  independent 
and  conscientiously  deliberate  decision. 

The  result  again  did  not  reward  him.  His  choice  of 
Burnside  was  a  mistake.  There  were  corps  commanders 
under  McClellan  who  had  earned  special  confidence, 
but  they  were  all  rather  old.  General  Burnside,  who 
was  the  senior  among  the  rest,  had  lately  succeeded  in 
operations  in  connection  with  the  Navy  on  the  North 
Carolina  coast,  whereby  certain  harbours  were  perma 
nently  closed  to  the  South.  He  had  since  served 
under  McClellan  at  the  Antietam,  but  had  not  earned 
much  credit.  He  was  a  loyal  friend  to  McClellan  and 
very  modest  about  his  own  capacity.  Perhaps  both 
these  things  prejudiced  Lincoln  in  his  favour.  He 
continued  in  active  service  till  nearly  the  end  of  the 
war,  when  a  failure  led  to  his  retirement ;  and  he  was 
always  popular  and  respected.  At  this  juncture  he 
failed  disastrously.  On  December  Hand  12,  1862,  Lee's 
army  lay  strongly  posted  on  the  south  of  the  Rappahan- 
nock.  Burnside,  in  spite,  as  it  appears,  of  express 
warnings  from  Lincoln,  attacked  Lee  at  precisely  the 
point,  near  the  town  of  Fredericksburg,  where  his 
position  was  really  impregnable.  The  defeat  of  the 
Northern  army  was  bloody  and  overwhelming.  Burn- 
side's  army  became  all  but  mutinous  ;  his  corps  com 
manders,  especially  General  Hooker,  were  loud  in 
complaint.  He  was  tempted  to  persist,  in  spite  of  all 
protests,  in  some  further  effort  of  rashness.  Lincoln 
endeavoured  to  restrain  him.  Halleck,  whom  Lincoln 
begged  to  give  a  definite  military  opinion,  upholding  or 
overriding  Burnside's,  had  nothing  more  useful  to  oifer 
than  his  own  resignation.  After  discussions  and  re 
criminations  among  all  officers  concerned,  Burnside 
offered  his  resignation.  Lincoln  was  by  no  means 
disposed  to  remove  a  general  upon  a  first  failure  or  to 
side  with  his  subordinates  against  him,  and  refused  to 
accept  it.  Burnside  then  offered  the  impossible  alterna 
tive  of  the  dismissal  of  all  his  corps  commanders  for 
disaffection  to  him,  and  on  January  25,  1863,  his 
resignation  was  accepted. 


THE  DISASTERS  OF  THE  NORTH       309 

There  was  much  discussion  in  the  Cabinet  as  to  the 
choice  of  his  successor.  It  was  thought  unwise  to  give 
the  Eastern  army  a  commander  from  the  West  again. 
At  Chase's  instance  the  senior  corps  commander  who 
was  not  too  old,  General  Hooker,  sometimes  called 
"  Fighting  Joe  Hooker,"  was  appointed.  He  received  a 
letter,  often  quoted  as  the  letter  of  a  man  much  altered 
from  the  Lincoln  who  had  been  groping  a  year  earlier 
after  the  right  way  of  treating  McClellan  :  "I  have 
placed  you,"  wrote  Lincoln,  "  at  the  head  of  the  Army 
of  the  Potomac.  Of  course  I  have  done  this  upon  what 
appear  to  me  to  be  sufficient  reasons,  and  yet  I  think 
it  best  for  you  to  know  that  there  are  some  things  in 
regard  to  which  I  am  not  quite  satisfied  with  you. 
I  believe  you  to  be  a  brave  and  skilful  soldier,  which 
of  course  I  like.  I  also  believe  that  you  do  not  mix 
politics  with  your  profession,  in  which  you  are  right. 
You  have  confidence  in  yourself,  which  is  a  valuable, 
if  not  indispensable,  quality.  You  are  ambitious, 
which,  within  reasonable  bounds,  does  good  rather  than 
harm ;  but  I  think  that  during  General  Burnside's 
command  of  the  army  you  have  taken  counsel  of  your 
ambition  and  thwarted  him  as  much  as  you  could,  in 
which  you  did  a  great  wrong  to  the  country,  and  to  a 
most  meritorious  and  honourable  brother  officer.  I  have 
heard,  in  such  a  way  as  to  believe  it,  of  your  recently 
saying  that  both  the  Army  and  the  Government  needed 
a  dictator.  Of  course  it  was  not  for  this,  but  in  spite 
of  it,  that  I  gave  you  the  command.  Only  those 
generals  who  gain  successes  can  set  up  dictators.  What 
I  now  ask  of  you  is  military  success,  and  I  will  risk 
the  dictatorship.  The  Government  will  support  you  to 
the  utmost  of  its  ability,  which  is  neither  more  nor  less 
than  it  has  done  and  will  do  for  all  commanders.  I 
much  fear  that  the  spirit  which  you  have  aided  to  infuse 
into  the  army,  of  criticising  their  commander  and 
withholding  confidence  from  him,  will  now  turn  upon 
you.  Neither  you  nor  Napoleon,  if  he  were  alive  again, 
could  get  any  good  out  of  an  army  while  such  a  spirit 
prevails  in  it ;  and  now  beware  of  rashness.  Beware  of 


310  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

rashness,  but  with  energy  and  sleepless  vigilance  go 
forward  and  give  us  victories." 

"  He  talks  to  me  like  a  father,"  exclaimed  Hooker, 
enchanted  with  a  rebuke  such  as  this.  He  was  a  fine, 
frank,  soldierly  fellow,  with  a  noble  figure,  with  "  a  grand 
fighting  head,"  fresh  complexion  and  bright  blue  eyes. 
He  was  a  good  organiser  ;  he  put  a  stop  to  the  constant 
desertions  ;  he  felt  the  need  of  improving  the  Northern 
cavalry ;  and  he  groaned  at  the  spirit  with  which 
McClellan  had  infected  his  army,  a  curious  collective 
inertness  among  men  who  individually  were  daring. 
He  seems  to  have  been  highly  strung  ;  the  very  little 
wine  that  he  drank  perceptibly  affected  him  ;  he  gave 
it  up  altogether  in  his  campaigns.  And  he  cannot  have 
been  very  clever,  for  the  handsomest  beating  that  Lee 
could  give  him  left  him  unaware  that  Lee  was  a  general. 
In  the  end  of  April,  he  crossed  the  Rappahannock  and 
the  Rapidan,  which  still  divided  the  two  armies,  and  in 
the  first  week  of  May,  1863,  a  brief  campaign,  full  of 
stirring  incident,  came  to  a  close  with  the  three  days' 
battle  of  Chancellorsville,  in  which  Hooker,  hurt  and 
dazed  with  pain,  lost  control  and  presence  of  mind,  and, 
with  heavy  loss,  drew  back  across  the  Rappahannock. 
The  South  had  won  another  amazing  victory  ;  but 
"  Stonewall "  Jackson,  at  the  age  of  thirty-nine,  had 
fallen  in  the  battle. 

Abroad,  this  crowning  disaster  to  the  North  seemed 
to  presage  the  full  triumph  of  the  Confederacy  ;  and  it 
was  a  gloomy  time  enough  for  Lincoln  and  his  Ministers. 
A  second  and  more  serious  invasion  by  Lee  was  impend 
ing,  and  the  lingering  progress  of  events  in  the  West, 
of  which  the  story  must  soon  be  resumed,  caused  pro 
tracted  and  deepening  anxiety.  But  the  tide  turned  soon. 
Moreover,  Lincoln's  military  perplexities,  which  have 
demanded  our  detailed  attention  during  these  particular 
campaigns,  were  very  nearly  at  an  end.  We  have  here  to 
turn  back  to  the  political  problem  of  his  Presidency,  for 
the  bloody  and  inconclusive  battle  upon  the  Antietam, 
more  than  seven  months  before,  had  led  strangely  to 
political  consequences  which  were  great  and  memorable. 


CHAPTER  X 

EMANCIPATION 

WHEN  the  news  of  a  second  Battle  of  Bull  Run 
reached  England  it  seemed  at  first  to  Lord  John  Russell 
that  the  failure  of  the  North  was  certain,  and  he  asked 
Palmerston  and  his  colleagues  to  consider  whether 
they  must  not  soon  recognise  the  Confederacy,  and 
whether  mediation  in  the  interest  of  peace  and  humanity 
might  not  perhaps  follow.  But  within  two  months  all 
thoughts  of  recognising  the  Confederacy  had  been  so 
completely  put  aside  that  even  Fredericksburg  and 
Chancellorsville  caused  no  renewal  of  the  suggestion, 
and  an  invitation  from  Louis  Napoleon  to  joint  action 
of  this  kind  between  England  and  France  had  once 
for  all  been  rejected.  The  Battle  of  Antietam  had 
been  fought  in  the  meantime.  This  made  men  think 
that  the  South  could  no  more  win  a  speedy  and  decisive 
success  than  the  North,  and  that  victory  must  rest  in 
the  end  with  the  side  that  could  last.  But  that  was  not 
all ;  the  Battle  of  Antietam  was  followed  within  five 
days  by  an  event  which  made  it  impossible  for  any 
Government  of  this  country  to  take  action  unj^iendly 
to  the  North. 

On  September  22,  1862,  Abraham  Lincoln  set  his 
hand  to  a  Proclamation  of  which  the  principal  words 
were  these  :  "  That,  on  the  first  day  of  January  in  the 
year  of  our  Lord  one  thousand  eight  hundred  and  sixty- 
three,  all  persons  held  as  slaves  within  any  State,  or 
designated  part  of  a  State,  the  people  whereof  shall  then 
be  in  rebellion  against  the  United  States,  shall  be  then, 
thenceforward  and  forever  free." 

The  policy  and  the  true  effect  of  this  act  cannot  be 
understood  without  some  examination.  Still  less  so 
can  the  course  of  the  man  who  will  always  be  remem- 


312  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

bered  as  its  author.     First,  in  regard  to  the  legal  effect 
of  the   Proclamation  ;    in  normal  times  the   President 
would  of  course  not  have  had  the  power,  which  even  the 
Legislature  did  not  possess,  to  set  free  a  single  slave  ; 
the   Proclamation  was  an  act  of  war  on  his  part,  as 
Commander-in-Chief  of  the  forces,  by  which  slaves  were 
to  be  taken  from  people  at  war  with  the  United  States, 
just  as  horses  or  carts  might  be  taken,  to  subtract  from 
their  resources  and  add  to  those  of  the  United  States. 
In  a  curiously  prophetic  manner,   Ex-President  John 
Quincy  Adams   had   argued   in   Congress   many  years 
before  that,  if  rebellion  ever  arose,  this  very  thing  might 
be  done.  -  Adams  would  probably  have  claimed  that 
the  command  of  the  President  became  law  in  the  States 
which  took  part  in  the  rebellion.     Lincoln  only  claimed 
legal  force  for  his  Proclamation  in  so  far  as  it  was  an 
act  of  war  based  on  sufficient  necessity  and  plainly 
tending  to  help  the  Northern  arms.     If  the  legal  question 
had  ever  been  tried  out,  the  Courts  would  no  doubt  have 
had  to  hold  that  at  least  those  slaves  who  obtained 
actual  freedom   under  the    Proclamation   became   free 
in  law  ;   for  it  was  certainly  in  good  faith  an  act  of  war, 
and  the  military  result  justified  it.     A  large  amount  of 
labour  was  withdrawn  from  the  industry  necessary  to 
the  South,  and  by  the  end  of  the  war  180,000  coloured 
troops  were  in  arms  for  the  North,  rendering  services, 
especially  in   occupying  conquered   territory  that  was 
unhealthy  for  white  troops,  without  which,  in  Lincoln's 
opinion,  the  war  could  never  have  been  finished.     The 
Proclamation  had  indeed  an  indirect  effect  mere  far- 
reaching  than  this  ;   it  committed  the  North  to  a  course 
from  which  there  could  be  no  turning  back,   except  by 
surrender  ;   it  made  it  a  political  certainty  that  by  one 
means  or  another  slavery  wo  aid  be  ended  if  the  North 
won.     But  in  Lincoln's  view  of  his  duty  as  President, 
this    ulterior    consequence    was    not    to    determine    his 
action.     The  fateful  step  by  which  the  end  of  slavery 
was  precipitated  would  not  have  taken  the  form  it  did 
take  if  it  had  not  come  to  commend  itself  to  him  as  a 
military  measure  conducing  to  the  suppression  of  rebellion. 


EMANCIPATION  313 

On  the  broader  grounds  on  which  we  naturally  look  at 
this  measure,  many  people  in  the  North  had,  as  we  have 
seen,  been  anxious  from  the  beginning  that  he  should 
adopt  an  active  policy  of  freeing  Southern  slaves.  It 
was  intolerable  to  think  that  the  war  might  end  and  / 
leave  slavery  where  it  was.  To  convert  the  war  into  a/ 
crusade  against  slavery  seemed  to  many  the  best  way/, 
of  arousing  and  uniting  the  North.  This  argument  was'1 
reinforced  by  some  of  the  American  Ministers  abroad. 
They  were  aware  that  people  in  Europe  misunderstood 
and  disliked  the  Constitutional  propriety  with  which  the 
Union  government  insisted  that  it  was  not  attacking 
the  domestic  institutions  of  Southern  States.  English 
people  did  not  know  the  American  Constitution,  and 
when  told  that  the  North  did  not  threaten  to  abolish 
slavery,  would  answer  "  why  not  ?  "  Many  Englishmen, 
who  might  dislike  the  North  and  might  have  their 
doubts  as  to  whether  slavery  was  as  bad  as  it  was  said 
to  be,  would  none  the  less  have  respected  men  who 
would  fight  against  it.  They  had  no  interest  in  the 
attempt  of  some  of  their  own  seceded  Colonists  to  coerce, 
upon  some  metaphysical  ground  of  law,  others  who 
in  their  turn  wished  to  secede  from  them.  Seward, 
with  wonderful  misjudgment,  had  instructed  Ministers 
abroad  to  explain  that  no  attack  was  threatened  on 
slavery,  for  he  was  afraid  that  the  purchasers  of  cotton 
in  Europe  would  feel  threatened  in  their  selfish  interests  ; 
the  agents  of  the  South  were  astute  enough  to  take  the 
same  line  and  insist  like  him  that  the  North  was  no 
more  hostile  to  slavery  than  the  South.  If  this  mis 
understanding  were  removed  English  hostility  to  the 
North  would  never  again  take  a  dangerous  form. 
Lincoln,  who  knew  less  of  affairs  but  more  of  men  than 
Seward,  was  easily  made  to  see  this.  Yet,  with  full 
knowledge  of  the  reasons  for  adopting  a  decided  policy 
against  slavery,  Lincoln  waited  through  seventeen 
months  of  the  war  till  the  moment  had  come  for  him 
to  strike  his  blow. 

Some  of  his  reasons  for  waiting  were  very  plain.     He 
was  not  going  to  take  action  on  the  alleged  ground  of 


3H  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

military  necessity  till  he  was  sure  that  the  necessity 
existed.  Nor  was  he  going  to  take  it  till  it  would 
actually  lead  to  the  emancipation  of  a  great  number  of 
slaves.  Above  all,  he  would  not  act  till  he  felt  that  the 
North  generally  would  sustain  his  action,  for  he  knew, 
better  than  Congressmen  who  judged  from  their  own 
friends  in  their  own  constituencies,  how  doubtful  a  large 
part  of  Northern  opinion  really  was.  We  have  seen 
how  in  the  summer  of  1861  he  felt  bound  to  disappoint 
the  advanced  opinion  which  supported  Fremont.  He 
continued  for  more  than  a  year  after  in  a  course  which 
alienated  from  himself  the  confidence  of  the  men  with 
whom  he  had  most  sympathy.  He  did  this  deliberately 
rather  than  imperil  the  unanimity  with  which  the 
North  supported  the  war.  There  was  indeed  grave 
danger  of  splitting  the  North  in  two  if  he  appeared 
unnecessarily  to  change  the  issue  from  Union  to  Libera 
tion.  We  have  to  remember  that  in  all  the  Northern 
States  the  right  of  the  Southern  States  to  choose  for 
themselves  about  slavery  had  been  fully  admitted,  and 
that  four  of  the  Northern  States  were  themselves  slave 
States  all  this  while. 

But  this  is  not  the  whole  explanation  of  his  delay. 
It  is  certain  that  apart  from  this  danger  he  would  at 
first  rather  not  have  played  the  historic  part  which  he 
did  play  as  the  liberator  of  the  slaves,  if  he  could  have 
succeeded  in  the  more  modest  part  of  encouraging  a 
process  of  gradual  emancipation.  In  his  Annual  Message 
to  Congress  in  December,  1861,  he  laid  down  the  general 
principles  of  his  policy  in  this  matter.  He  gave  warning 
in  advance  to  the  Democrats  of  the  North,  who  were 
against  all  interference  with  Southern  institutions,  that 
"  radical  and  extreme  measures  "  might  become  in 
dispensable  to  military  success,  and  if  indispensable 
would  be  taken  ;  but  he  declared  his  anxiety  that  if 
possible  the  conflict  with  the  South  should  not  "  de 
generate  into  a  violent  and  remorseless  revolutionary 
struggle,"  for  he  looked  forward  with  fear  to  a  complete 
overturning  of  the  social  system  of  the  South.  He 
feared  it  not  only  for  the  white  people  but  also  for  the 


EMANCIPATION  315 

black.  "  Gradual  and  not  sudden  emancipation,"  he 
said,  in  a  later  Message,  "  is  better  for  all."  It  is  now 
probable  that  he  was  right,  and  yet  it  is  difficult  not 
to  sympathise  with  the  earnest  Republicans  who  were 
impatient  at  his  delay,  who  were  puzzled  and  pained 
by  the  free  and  easy  way  in  which  in  grave  conversation 
he  would  allude  to  "  the  nigger  question,"  and  who 
concluded  that  "  the  President  is  not  with  us  ;  has  no 
sound  Anti-slavery  sentiment."  Indeed,  his  sentiment 
did  differ  from  theirs.  Certainly  he  hated  slavery,  for 
he  had  contended  more  stubbornly  than  any  other  man 
against  any  concession  which  seemed  to  him  to  per 
petuate  slavery  by  stamping  it  with  approval ;  but 
his  hatred  of  it  left  him  quite  without  the  passion  of 
moral  indignation  against  the  slave  owners,  in  whose 
guilt  the  whole  country,  North  and  South,  seemed  to 
him  an  accomplice.  He  would  have  classed  that  very 
natural  indignation  under  the  head  of  "  malice  " — "  I 
shall  do  nothing  in  malice,"  he  wrote  to  a  citizen  of 
Louisiana  ;  "  what  I  deal  with  is  too  vast  for  malicious 
dealing."  But  it  was  not,  as  we  shall  see  before  long, 
too  vast  for  an  interest,  as  sympathetic  as  it  was  matter 
of  fact,  in  the  welfare  of  the  negroes.  They  were  actual 
human  beings  to  him,  and  he  knew  that  the  mere 
abrogation  of  the  law  of  slavery  was  not  the  only  thing 
necessary  to  their  advancement.  Looking  back,  with 
knowledge  of  what  happened  later,  we  cannot  fail  to 
be  glad  that  they  were  emancipated  somehow,  but  we 
are  forced  to  regret  that  they  could  not  have  been 
emancipated  by  some  more  considerate  process.  Lincoln, 
perhaps  alone  among  the  Americans  who  were  in  earnest 
in  this  matter,  looked  at  it  very  much  in  the  light  in 
which  all  men  look  at  it  to-day. 

In  the  early  part  of  1862  the  United  States  Government 
concluded  a  treaty  with  Great  Britain  for  the  more 
effectual  suppression  of  the  African  slave  trade,  and  it 
happened  about  the  same  time  that  the  first  white 
man  ever  executed  as  a  pirate  under  the  American  law 
against  the  slave  trade  was  hanged  in  New  York.  In 
those  months  Lincoln  was  privately  trying  to  bring 


316  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

about  the  passing  by  the  Legislature  of  Delaware  of 
an  Act  for  emancipating,  with  fit  provisions  for  their 
welfare,  the  few  slaves  in  that  State,  conditionally  upon 
compensation  to  be  paid  to  the  owners  by  the  United 
States.     He  hoped  that  if  this  example  were  set  by 
Delaware,  it  would  be  followed  in  Maryland,  and  would 
spread  later.     The  Delaware  House  were  favourable  to 
the  scheme,   but  the  Senate  of  the  State  rejected  it. 
Lincoln  now  made  a  more  public  appeal  in  favour  of 
his    policy.     In   March,    1862,    he   sent   a   Message   to 
Congress,  which  has  already  been  quoted,  and  in  which 
he  urged  the  two  Houses  to  pass  Resolutions  pledging 
the  United  States  to  give  pecuniary  help  to  any  State 
which    adopted    gradual    emancipation.     It    must    be 
obvious  that  if  the  slave  States  of  the  North  could  have 
been  led  to  adopt  this  policy  it  would  have  been  a 
fitting  preliminary  to  any  action  which  might  be  taken 
against  slavery  in  the  South  ;    and  the  policy  might 
have   been   extended  to   those   Southern   States  which 
were  first  recovered  for  the  Union.     The  point,  however, 
upon  which  ^Lincoln  dwelt  in  his  Message  was  that,  if 
slavery  were  once  given  up  by  the  border  States  the 
South  would  abandon  all  hope  that  they  would  ever  join 
the  Confederacy.     In  private  letters  to  an  editor  of  a 
newspaper  and  others  he  pressed  the  consideration  that 
the  cost  of  compensated  abolition  was  small  in  proportion 
to  what  might  be  gained  by  a  quicker  ending  of  the 
war.     During  the  discussion  of  his  proposal  in  Congress 
and  again  after  the  end  of  the  Session  he  invited  the 
Senators  and  Representatives  of  the  border  States  to 
private  conference  with  him  in  which  he  besought  of 
them  "  a  calm  and  enlarged  consideration,  ranging,  if 
it  may  be,  far  above,  personal  and  partisan  politics," 
of  the  opportunity  of  good  now  open  to  them.     The 
hope  of  the  Confederacy  was,   as  he  then  conceived, 
fixed  upon  the  sympathy  which  it  might  arouse  in  the 
border  States,  two  of  which,  Kentucky  and  Maryland, 
were  in  fact  invaded  that  year  with  some  hope  of  a 
rising    among    the    inhabitants.     The    "  lever "    which 
the  Confederates  hoped  to  use  in  these  States  was  the 


EMANCIPATION  317 

interest  of  the  slave-owners  there  ;  "  Break  that  lever 
before  their  eyes,"  he  urged.  But  the  hundred  and 
one  reasons  which  can  always  be  found  against  action 
presented  themselves  at  once  to  the  representatives  of 
the  border  States.  Congress  itself  so  far  accepted  the 
President's  view  that  both  Houses  passed  the  Resolution 
which  he  had  suggested.  Indeed  it  gladly  did  something 
more ;  a  Bill,  such  as  Lincoln  himself  had  prepared  as  a 
Congressman  fourteen  years  before,  was  passed  for 
abolishing  slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia  ;  com 
pensation  was  paid  to  the  owners  ;  a  sum  was  set  apart 
to  help  the  settlement  in  Liberia  of  any  of  the  slaves  who 
were  willing  to  go  ;  and  at  Lincoln's  suggestion  pro 
vision  was  added  for  the  education  of  the  negro  children. 
Nothing  more  was  done  at  this  time. 

Throughout  this  matter  Lincoln  took  counsel  chiefly 
with  himself.  He  could  not  speak  his  full  thought  to  the 
public,  and  apparently  he  did  not  do  so  to  any  of  his 
Cabinet.  Supposing  that  the  border  States  had  yielded 
to  his  persuasion,  it  may  still  strike  us  as  a  very  sanguine 
calculation  that  their  action  would  have  €  had  much 
effect  upon  the  resolution  of  the  Confederates.  But  it 
must  be  noted  that  when  Lincoln  first  approached  the 
Representatives  of  'the  border  States,  the  highest 
expectations  were  entertained  of  the  victory  that 
McClellan  would  win  in  Virginia,  and  when  he  made 
his  last,  rather  despairing,  appeal  to  them,  the  decision 
to  withdraw  the  army  from  the  Peninsula  had  not  yet 
been  taken.  If  a  really  heavy  blow  had  been  struck 
at  the  Confederates  in  Virginia,  their  chief  hope  of 
retrieving  their  military  fortunes  would  certainly  have 
lain"  in  that  invasion  of  Kentucky,  which  did  shortly 
afterwards  occur  and  which  was  greatly  encouraged  by 
the  hope  of  a  rising  of  Kentucky  men  who  wished  to 
join  the  Confederacy.  This  part  of  Lincoln's  calculations 
was  therefore  quite  reasonable.  And  it  was  further 
reasonable  to  suppose  that,  if  the  South  had  then  given  in 
and  Congress  had  acted  in  the  spirit  of  the  Resolution 
which  it  had  passed,  the  policy  of  gradual  emancipation, 
starting  in  the  border  States,  would  have  spread 


3i 8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

steadily.  The  States  which,  were  disposed  to  hold  out 
against  the  inducement  that  the  cost  of  compensated 
emancipation,  if  they  adopted  it,  would  be  borne  by 
the  whole  Union,  would  have  done  so  at  a  great  risk ; 
for  each  new  free  State  would  have  been  disposed  before 
long  to  support  a  Constitutional  Amendment  to  impose 
enfranchisement,  possibly  with  no  compensation,  upon 
the  States  that  still  delayed.  The  force  of  example 
and  the  presence  of  this  fear  could  not  have  been 
resisted  long.  Lincoln  was  not  a  man  who  could  be 
accused  of  taking  any  course  without  a  reason  well 
thought  out ;  we  can  safely  conclude  that  in  the  summer 
of  1862  he  nursed  a  hope,  by  no  means  visionary,  of 
initiating  a  process  of  liberation  free  from  certain  evils 
in  that  upon  which  he  was  driven  back. 

Before,  however,  he  had  quite  abandoned  this  hope 
he  had  already  begun  to  see  his  way  in  case  it  failed. 
His  last  appeal  to  the  border  States  was  made  on 
July  12,  1862,  while  McClellan's  army  still  lay  at 
Harrison's  Landing.  On  the  following  day  he  privately 
told  Seward  and  Bates  that  he  had  "  about  come  to  the 
conclusion  that  it  was  a  military  necessity,  absolutely 
essential  to  the  salvation  of  the  nation,  that  we  must  free 
the  slaves  or  be  ourselves  subdued."  On  July  22  he 
read  to  his  Cabinet  the  first  draft  of  his  Proclamation  of 
Emancipation  ;  telling  them  before  he  consulted  them 
that  substantially  his  mind  was  made  up.  Various 
members  of  the  Cabinet  raised  points  on  which  he  had 
already  thought  and  had  come  to  a  conclusion,  but, 
as  he  afterwards  told  a  friend,  Seward  raised  a  point 
which  had  never  struck  him  before.  He  said  that,  if 
issued  at  that  time  of  depression,  just  after  the  failure 
in  the  Peninsula,  the  Proclamation  would  seem  like  "  a 
cry  of  distress "  ;  and  that  it  would  have  a  much 
better  effect  if  it  were  issued  after  some  military  success. 

Seward  was  certainly  right.  The  danger  of  division 
in  the  North  would  have  been  increased  and  the  prospect 
of  a  good  effect  abroad  would  have  been  diminished  if 
the  Proclamation  had  been  issued  at  a  time  of  depression 
and  manifest  failure.  Lincoln,  who  had  been  set  on 


EMANCIPATION  319 

issuing  it,  instantly  felt  the  force  of  this  objection.  He 
put  aside  his  draft,  and  resolved  not  to  issue  the 
Proclamation  till  the  right  moment,  and  apparently 
resolved  to  keep  the  whole  question  open  in  his  own 
mind  till  the  time  for  action  came. 

Accordingly  the  two  months  which  followed  were  not 
only  full  of  anxiety  about  the  war  ;    they  were  full  for 
him  of  a  suspense  painfully  maintained.     It  troubled 
him  perhaps  comparatively  little  that  he  was  driven 
into  a  position  of  greater  aloofness  from  the  support 
and  sympathy  of  any  party  or  school.     He  must  now 
expect  an  opposition  from  the  Democrats  of  the  North, 
for  they  had  declared  themselves  strongly  against  the 
Resolution   which  he  had  induced   Congress   to   pass. 
And  the  strong  Republicans  for  their  part  had  acquiesced 
in  it  coldly,  some  of  them  contemptuously.     In  May 
of  this   year   he  had   been   forced   for   a   second   time 
publicly  to  repress  a  keen  Republican  general  who  tried 
to  take  this  question  of  great  policy  into  his  own  hands. 
General  Hunter,  commanding  a  small  expedition  which 
had   seized   Port   Royal  in   South  Carolina   and   some 
adjacent  islands  rich  in  cotton,  had  in  a  grand  manner 
assumed  to  declare  free  all  the  slaves  in  South  Carolina, 
Georgia  and  Florida.     This,  of  course,  could  not  be  let 
pass.     Congress,  too,  had  been  occupied  in  the  summer 
with   a  new  measure  for  confiscating  rebel  property ; 
some  Republicans  in  the  West  set  great  store  on  such 
confiscation  ;   other  Republicans  saw  in  it  the  incidental 
advantage  that  more  slaves  might  be  liberated  under  it. 
It  was  learnt  that  the  President  might  put  his  veto  upon 
it.     It  seemed  to  purport,    contrary   to   the   Constitu 
tion,  to  attaint  the  property  of  rebels  after  their  death, 
and  Lincoln  was  unwilling  that  the  Constitution  should 
be  stretched  in  the  direction  of  revengeful  harshness. 
The  objectionable  feature  in  the  Bill  was  removed,  and 
Lincoln  accepted  it.     But  the  suspicion  with  which  many 
Republicans  were   beginning  to  regard   him   was   now 
reinforced  by  a  certain  jealousy  of  Congressmen  against 
the    Executive    power ;     they   grumbled    and    sneered 
about  having  to  "  ascertain  the  Royal  pleasure  "  before 


320  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

they  could  legislate.  This  was  an  able,  energetic,  and 
truly  patriotic  Congress,  and  must  not  be  despised  for 
its  reluctance  to  be  guided  by  Lincoln.  But  it  was 
reluctant. 

Throughout  August  and  September  he  had  to  deal 
in  the  country  with  dread  on  the  one  side  of  any 
revolutionary  action,  and  belief  on  the  other  side  that 
he  was  timid  and  half-hearted.  The  precise  state  of  his 
intentions  could  not  with  advantage  be  made  public. 
To  upholders  of  slavery  he  wrote  plainly,  "  It  may  as 
well  be  understood  once  for  all  that  I  shall  not  surrender 
this  game  leaving  any  available  card  unplayed  "  ;  to 
its  most  zealous  opponents  he  had  to  speak  in  an  entirely 
different  strain.  While  the  second  Battle  of  Bull  Run 
was  impending,  Horace  Greeley  published  in  the 
New  York  Tribune,  an  "  open  letter  "  of  angry  com 
plaint  about  Lincoln's  supposed  bias  for  slavery. 
Lincoln  at  once  published  a  reply  to  his  letter.  "  If 
there  be  in  it,"  he  said,  "  any  statements  or  assumptions 
of  fact  which  I  may  know  to  be  erroneous,  I  do  not 
now  and  here  controvert  them.  If  there  be  perceptible 
in  it  an  impatient  and  dictatorial  tone,  I  waive  it  in 
deference  to  an  old  friend  whose  heart  I  have  always 
supposed  to  be  right.  My  paramount  object  in  this 
struggle  is  to  save  the  Union.  If  I  could  save  the 
Union  without  freeing  any  slaves  I  would  do  it ;  and 
if  I  could  save  it  by  freeing  all  the  slaves  I  would  do  it ; 
and  if  I  could  save  it  by  freeing  some  and  leaving  others 
alone,  I  would  also  do  that.  I  shall  do  less  whenever  I 
shall  believe  what  I  am  doing  hurts  the  cause,  and  I 
shall  do  more  whenever  I  shall  believe  doing  more  will 
help  the  cause.  I  shall  adopt  new  views  so  fast  as  they 
shall  appear  to  be  true  views." 

It  was  probably  easy  to  him  now  to  write  these 
masterful  generalities,  but  a  week  or  two  later,  after 
Pope's  defeat,  he  had  to  engage  in  a  controversy  which 
tried  his  feelings  much  more  sorely.  It  had  really 
grieved  him  that  clergymen  in  Illinois  had  opposed  him 
as  unorthodox,  when  he  was  fighting  against  the 
extension  of  slavery.  Now,  a  week  or  two  after  his 


EMANCIPATION  321 

correspondence  with  Greeley,  a  deputation  from  a 
number  of  Churches  in  Chicago  waited  upon  him,  and 
some  of  their  members  spoke  to  him  with  assumed 
authority  from  on  high,  commanding  him  in  God's 
name  to  emancipate  the  slaves.  He  said,  "  I  am 
approached  with  the  most  opposite  opinions  and  advice, 
and  that  by  religious  men  who  are  equally  certain  that 
they  represent  the  divine  will/  I  am  sure  that  either 
the  one  or  the  other  class  is  mistaken  in  that  belief, 
and  perhaps  in  some  respects  both.  I  hope  it  will  not 
be  irreverent  for  me  to  say  that,  if  it  is  probable  that 
God  would  reveal  His  will  to  others,  on  a  point  so 
connected  with  my  duty,  it  might  be  supposed  He  would 
reveal  it  directly  to  me.  What  good  would  a  proclama 
tion  of  emancipation  from  me  do  especially  as  we  are 
now  situated  ?  I  do  not  want  to  issue  a  document  that 
the  whole  world  will  see  must  necessarily  be  inoperative 
like  the  Pope's  Bull  against  the  comet.  Do  not  mis 
understand  me,  because  I  have  mentioned  these  ob 
jections.  They  indicate  the  difficulties  that  have  thus 
far  prevented  my  acting  in  some  such  way  as  you 
desire.  I  have  not  decided  against  a  proclamation  of 
liberty  to  the  slaves,  but  hold  the  matter  under  advise 
ment.  And  I  can  assure  you  that  the  subject  is  on 
my  mind,  by  day  and  night,  more  than  any  other. 
Whatever  shall  appear  to  be  God's  will,  I  will  do." 
The  language  of  this  speech,  especially  when  the  touch 
is  humorous,  seems  that  of  a  strained  and  slightly 
irritated  man,  but  the  solemnity  blended  in  it  showed 
Lincoln's  true  mind. 

In  this  month,  September,  1862,  he  composed  for  his 
own  reading  alone  a  sad  and  inconclusive  fragment  of 
meditation  which  was  found  after  his  death.  "  The  will 
of  God  prevails,"  he  wrote.  "  In  great  contests  each 
party  claims  to  act  in  accordance  with  the  will  of  God. 
Both  may  be  and  one  must  be  wrong.  God  cannot  be 
for  and  against  the  same  thing  at  the  same  time.  In 
the  present  civil  war  it  is  quite  possible  that  God's 
purpose  is  something  different  from  the  purpose  of 
either  party,  and  yet  the  human  instrumentalities, 


322  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

working  just  as  they  do,  are  of  the  best  adaptation  to 
effect  His  purpose.  I  am  almost  ready  to  say  that  this 
is  probably  true,  that  God  wills  this  contest,  and  wills 
that  it  shall  not  end  yet.  By  His  mere  great  power  on 
the  minds  of  the  contestants,  He  could  have  either 
saved  or  destroyed  the  Union  without  a  human  contest. 
Yet  the  contest  began,  and,  having  begun,  He  could 
give  the  final  victory  to  either  side  any  day.  Yet  the 
contest  proceeds."  For  Lincoln's  own  part  it  seemed  his 
plain  duty  to  do  what  in  the  circumstances  he  thought 
safest  for  the  Union,  and  yet  he  was  almost  of  a  mind 
with  the  deputation  which  had  preached  to  him,  that 
he  must  be  doing  God's  will  in  taking  a  great  step 
towards  emancipation.  The  solution,  that  the  great 
step  must  be  taken  at  the  first  opportune  moment,  was 
doubtless  clear  enough  in  principle,  but  it  must  always 
remain  arguable  whether  any  particular  moment  was 
opportune.  He  told  soon  afterwards  how  his  mind 
was  finally  made  up. 

V  On  the  day  that  he  received  the  news  of  the  Battle  of 
Antietam,  the  draft  Proclamation  was  taken  from  its 
drawer  and  studied  afresh  ;  his  visit  to  McClellan  on  the 
battlefield  intervened  ;  but  on  the  fifth  day  after  the 
battle,  the  Cabinet  was  suddenly  called  together.  When 
the  Ministers  had  assembled  Lincoln  first  entertained 
them  by  reading  the  short  chapter  of  Artemus  Ward 
entitled  "  High-handed  Outrage  at  Utica."  It  is  less 
amusing  than  most  of  Artemus  Ward ;  but  it  had  just 
appeared  ;  it  pleased  all  the  Ministers  except  Stanton, 
to  whom  the  frivolous  reading  he  sometimes  had  to 
hear  from  Lincoln  was  a  standing  vexation ;  and  it  was 
precisely  that  sort  of  relief  to  which  Lincoln's  mind 
when  overwrought  could  always  turn.  Having  thus 
composed  himself  for  business,  he  reminded  his  Cabinet 
that  he  had,  as  they  were  aware,  thought  a  great  deal 
about  the  relation  of  the  war  to  slavery,  and  had  a 
few  weeks  before  read  them  a  draft  Proclamation  on 
this  subject.  Ever  since  then,  he  said,  his  mind  had 
been  occupied  on  the  matter,  and,  though  he  wished  it 
were  a  better  time,  he  thought  the  time  had  come  now. 


EMANCIPATION  323 

"  When  the  rebel  army  was  at  Frederick,"  he  is  related 
to  have  continued,  "  I  determined,  as  soon  as  it  should 
be  driven  out  of  Maryland,  to  issue  a  Proclamation  of 
Emancipation  such  as  I  thought  likely  to  be  most  useful. 
I  said  nothing  to  any  one,  but  I  made  the  promise  to 
myself  and " — here  he  hesitated  a  little — "  to  my 
Maker.  The  rebel  army  is  now  driven  out,  and  I  am 
going  to  fulfil  that  promise.  I  have  got  you  together  to 
hear  what  I  have  written  down.  I  do  not  wish  your 
advice  about  the  main  matter,  for  that  I  have  determined 
for  myself.  This  I  say  without  intending  anything  but 
respect  for  any  one  of  you."  He  then  invited  their 
suggestions  upon  the  expressions  used  in  his  draft  and 
other  minor  matters,  and  concluded :  "  One  other 
observation  I  will  make.  I  know  very  well  that  many 
others  might  in  this  matter,  as  in  others,  do  better  than 
I  can  ;  and  if  I  was  satisfied  that  the  public  confidence 
was  more  fully  possessed  by  any  one  of  them  than  by 
me,  and  knew  of  any  constitutional  way  in  which  he 
could  be  put  in  my  place,  he  should  have  it.  I  would 
gladly  yield  it  to  him.  But  though  I  believe  I  have  not 
so  much  of  the  confidence  of  the  people  as  I  had  some 
time  since,  I  do  not  know  that,  all  things  considered, 
any  other  person  has  more  ;  and,  however  this  may  be, 
there  is  no  way  in  which  I  can  have  any  other  man  put 
where  I  am.  I  am  here  ;  I  must  do  the  best  I  can,  and 
bear  the  responsibility  of  taking  the  course  which  I  feel 
I  ought  to  take."  Then  he  read  his  draft,  and  in  the 
long  discussion  which  followed,  and  owing  to  which  a 
few  slight  changes  were  made  in  it,  he  told  them  further, 
without  any  false  reserve,  just  how  he  came  to  his 
decision.  In  his  great  perplexity  he  had  gone  on  his 
knees,  before  the  Battle  of  Antietam,  and,  like  a  child,  v 
he  had  promised  that  if  a  victory  was  given  which  drove 
the  enemy  out  of  Maryland  he  would  consider  it  as  an 
indication  that  it  was  his  duty  to  move  forward.  "  It 
might  be  thought  strange,"  he  said,  "  that  he  had  in 
this  way  submitted  the  disposal  of  matters,  when  the 
way  was  not  clear  to  his  mind  what  he  should  do.  God 
had  decided  this  question  in  favour  of  the  slaves." 


324  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Such  is  the  story  of  what  we  may  now  remember  as 
one  of  the  signal  events  in  the  chequered  progress  of 
Christianity.  We  have  to  follow  its  consequences  a 
little  further.  These  were  not  at  first  all  that  its  author 
would  have  hoped.  "  Commendation  in  newspapers 
and  by  distinguished  individuals  is,"  he  said  in  a 
private  letter,  "  all  that  a  vain  man  could  wish,"  but 
recruits  for  the  Army  did  not  seem  to  come  in  faster. 
In  October  and  November  there  were  elections  for 
Congress,  and  in  a  number  of  States  the  Democrats 
gained  considerably,  though  it  was  noteworthy  that 
the  Republicans  held  their  ground  not  only  in  New 
England,  and  in  the  furthest  Western  States,  but  also 
in  the  border  slave  States.  The  Democrats,  who  from 
this  time  on  became  very  formidable  to  Lincoln,  had 
other  matters  of  complaint,  as  will  be  seen  later,  but  they 
chiefly  denounced  the  President  for  trying  to  turn  the 
war  into  one  against  slavery.  "  The  Constitution  as  it 
is  and  the  Union  as  it  was  "  had  been  their  election  cry. 
The  good  hearing  that  they  got,  now  as  at  a  later  time, 
was  due  to  the  fact  that  people  were  depressed  about 
the  war  ;  and  it  is  plain  enough  that  Lincoln  had  been 
well  advised  in  delaying  his  action  till  after  a  military 
success.  As  it  was  there  was  much  that  seemed  to 
show  that  public  confidence  in  him  was  not  strong, 
but  public  confidence  in  any  man  is  hard  to  estimate, 
and  the  forces  that  in  the  end  move  opinion  most  are 
not  quickly  apparent.  There  are  little  indications  that 
his  power  and  character  were  slowly  establishing  their 
hold  ;  it  seems,  for  instance,  to  have  been  about  this 
time  that  "  old  Abe  "  or  "  Uncle  Abe  "  began  to  be 
widely  known  among  common  people  by  the  signifi 
cant  name  of  "  Father  Abraham,"  and  his  secretaries 
say  that  he  was  becoming  conscious  that  his  official 
utterances  had  a  deeper  effect  on  public  opinion  than 
any  immediate  response  to  them  in  Congress  showed. 

In  his  Annual  Message  of  December,  1862,  Lincoln 
put  before  Congress,  probably  with  little  hope  of  result, 
a  comprehensive  policy  for  dealing  with  slavery  justly 
and  finally.  He  proposed  that  a  Constitutional  Amend- 


EMANCIPATION  325 

ment  should  be  submitted  to  the  people  providing  :  first, 
that  compensation  should  be  given  in  United   States 
bonds  to  any  State,  whether  now  in  rebellion  or  not, 
which    should    abolish    slavery    before   the   year    1900; 
secondly,  that  the  slaves  who  had  once  enjoyed  actual 
freedom    through    the    chances   of    the  war  should    be 
permanently    free    and    that    their    owners    should    be 
compensated ;      thirdly,    that    Congress    should    have 
authority  to  spend  money  on  colonisation  for  negroes. 
Even  if  the  greater  part  of  these  objects  could  have 
been  accomplished  without  a  Constitutional  Amendment, 
it  is  evident  that  such  a  procedure  would  have  been 
more  satisfactory  in  the  eventual  resettlement  of  the 
Union.     He  urged  in  his  Message  how  desirable  it  was, 
as  a  part  of  the  effort  to  restore  the  Union,  that  the 
whole  North  should  be  agreed  in  a  concerted  policy  as 
to   slavery,   and   that   parties   should  for   this   purpose 
reconsider  their  positions.     "  The  dogmas  of  the  quiet 
past,"  he  said,  "  are  inadequate  to  the  stormy  present. 
The  occasion  is  piled  high  with  difficulty,  and  we  must 
rise  with  the  occasion.     As  our  case  is  new,  so  we  must 
think  anew  and  act  anew.     We  must  disenthrall  our 
selves,   and  then  we  shall  save   our   country.     Fellow 
citizens,  we  cannot  escape  history.     We  of  this  Congress 
and  this  Administration    will   be   remembered  in  spite 
of  ourselves.     No  personal  significance  or  insignificance 
can  spare  one  or  another  of  us.     We  say  we  are  for  the 
Union.     The  world  will  not  forget  that  we  say  this. 
We  know  how  to  save  the  Union.     The  world  knows  we 
do  know  how  to  save  it.     In  giving  freedom  to  the  slave 
we  assure  freedom  to  the  free.     We  shall  nobly  save  or 
meanly  lose  the  last,  best  hope  of  earth.     Other  means 
may  succeed,  this  could  not  fail."     The  last  four  words 
expressed  too  confident  a  hope  as  to  what  Northern 
policy   apart   from   Northern    arms   could    do   towards 
ending  the  war,  but  it  was  impossible  to  exaggerate  the 
value  which  a  policy,  concerted   between  parties  in  a 
spirit  of  moderation,  would  have  had  in  the  settlement 
after    victory.     Every    honest     Democrat    who    then 
refused  any  action  against  slavery  must  have  regretted 


326  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

it  before  three  years  were  out,  and  many  sensible 
Republicans  who  saw  no  use  in  such  moderation 
may  have  lived  to  regret  their  part  too.  Nothing  was 
done.  It  is  thought  that  Lincoln  expected  this  ;  but 
the  Proclamation  of  Emancipation  would  begin  to 
operate  within  a  month ;  it  would  produce  by  the  end  of 
the  war  a  situation  in  which  the  country  would  be  com 
pelled  to  decide  on  the  principle  of  slavery,  and  Lincoln 
had  at  least  done  his  part  in  preparing  men  to  face  the 
issue. 

Before  this,  the  nervous  and  irritable  feeling  of  many 
Northern  politicians,  who  found  in  emancipation  a  good 
subject  for  quarrel  among  themselves  and  in  the  slow 
progress  of  the  war  a  good  subject  of  quarrel  with  the 
Administration,  led  to  a  crisis  in  Lincoln's  Cabinet. 
Radicals  were  inclined  to  think  Seward's  influence  in 
the  Administration  the  cause  of  all  public  evils  ;  some 
of  them  had  now  got  hold  of  a  foolish  private  letter, 
which  he  had  written  to  Adams  in  England  a  few  months 
before,  denouncing  the  advocates  of  emancipation. 
Desiring  his  downfall,  they  induced  a  small  "  caucus  " 
of  Republican  Senators  to  speak  in  the  name  of  the 
party  and  the  nation  and  send  the  President  a  resolution 
demanding  such  changes  in  his  Cabinet  as  would  produce 
better  results  in  the  war.  Discontented  men  of  opposite 
opinions  could  unite  in  demanding  success  in  the  war  ; 
and  Conservative  Senators  joined  in  this  resolution 
hoping  that  it  would  get  rid  not  only  of  Seward,  but  also 
of  Chase  and  Stanton,  the  objects  of  their  particular 
antipathy.  Seward,  on  hearing  of  this,  ,gave  Lincoln 
his  resignation,  which  was  kept  private.  Though 
egotistic,  he  was  a  clever  man,  and  evidently  a  pleasant 
man  to  work  with  ;  he  was  a  useful  Minister  under  a 
wise  chief,  though  he  later  proved  a  harmful  one  under 
a  foolish  chief.  Stanton  was  most  loyal,  and  invaluable 
as  head  of  the  War  Department.  Chase,  as  Lincoln 
said  in  private  afterwards,  was  "  a  pretty  good  fellow 
and  a  very  able  man  "  ;  Lincoln  had  complete  confidence 
in  him  as  a  Finance  Minister,  and  could  not  easily 
have  replaced  him.  But  this  handsome,  dignified, 


EMANCIPATION  327 

and  righteous  person  was  unhappily  a  sneak.  Lincoln 
found  as  time  went  on  that,  if  he  ever  had  to  do  what 
was  disagreeable  to  some  important  man,  Chase  would 
pay  court  to  that  important  man  and  hint  how  differently 
he  himself  would  have  done  as  President.  On  this 
occasion  he  was  evidently  aware  that  Chase  had  en 
couraged  the  Senators  who  attacked  Seward.  Much 
as  he  wished  to  retain  each  of  the  two  for  his  own 
worth,  he  was  above  all  determined  that  one  should  not 
gain  a  victory  over  the  other.  Accordingly,  when  a 
deputation  of  nine  important  Senators  came  to  Lincoln 
to  present  their  grievances  against  Seward,  they  found 
themselves,  to  their  great  annoyance,  confronted  with 
all  the  Cabinet  except  Seward,  who  had  resigned, 
and  they  were  invited  by  Lincoln  to  discuss  the  matter 
in  his  presence  with  these  Ministers.  Chase,  to  his 
still  greater  annoyance,  found  himself,  as  the  principal 
Minister  there,  compelled  for  decency's  sake  to  defend 
Seward  from  the  very  attack  which  he  had  helped  to 
instigate.  The  deputation  withdrew,  not  sure  that, 
after  all,  it  wanted  Seward  removed.  Chase  next  day 
tendered,  as  was  natural,  his  resignation.  Lincoln 
was  able,  now  that  he  had  the  resignations  of  both  men, 
to  persuade  both  of  their  joint  duty  to  continue  in  the 
public  service.  By  this  remarkable  piece  of  riding  he 
saved  the  Union  from  a  great  danger.  The  Democratic 
opposition,  not  actually  to  the  prosecution  of  the  war, 
but  to  any  and  every  measure  essential  for  it,  was  now 
developing,  and  a  serious  division,  such  as  at  this  stage 
any  important  resignation  would  have  produced  in 
the  ranks  of  fhe  Republicans,  or,  as  they  now  called 
themselves,  the  "  Union  men,"  would  have  been 
perilous. 

On  the  first  day  of  January,  1863,  the  President  signed 
the  further  Proclamation  needed  to  give  effect  to 
emancipation.  The  small  portions  of  the  South  which 
were  not  in  rebellion  were  duly  excepted  ;  the  naval 
and  military  authorities  were  ordered  to  maintain  the 
freedom  of  the  slaves  seeking  their  protection  ;  the 
slaves  were  enjoined  to  abstain  from  violence  and  to 


328  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

66  labour  faithfully  for  reasonable  wages  "  if  opportunity 
were  given  them  ;  all  suitable  slaves  were  to  be  taken 
into  armed  service,  especially  for  garrison  duties. 
Before  the  end  of  1863,  a  hundred  thousand  coloured 
men  were  already  serving,  as  combatants  or  as  labourers 
on  military  work  in  about  equal  number.  They  were 
needed,  for  volunteering  was  getting  slack,  and  the 
work  of  guarding  and  repairing  railway  lines  was 
specially  repellent  to  Northern  volunteers.  The  coloured 
regiments  fought  well ;  they  behaved  well  in  every 
way.  Atrocious  threats  of  vengeance  on  them  and  their 
white  officers  were  officially  uttered  by  Jefferson  Davis, 
but,  except  for  one  hideous  massacre. wrought  in  the 
hottest  of  hot  blood,  only  a  few  crimes  by  individuals 
were  committed  in  execution  of  these  threats.  To 
Lincoln  himself  it  was  a  stirring  thought  that  when 
democratic  government  was  finally  vindicated  and 
restored  by  the  victory  of  the  Union,  "  then  there  will 
be  some  black  men  who  can  remember  that  with  silent 
tongue  and  clenched  teeth  and  steady  eye  and  well-poised 
bayonet  they  have  helped  mankind  on  to  this  great 
consummation."  There  was,  however,  prejudice  at  first 
among  many  Northern  officers  against  negro  enlistment. 
The  greatest  of  the  few  great  American  artists,  St. 
Gaudens,  commemorated  in  sculpture  (as  the  donor  of 
the  new  playing  fields  at  Harvard  commemorated  by 
his  gift)  the  action  of  a  brilliant  and  popular  Massa 
chusetts  officer,  Robert  Gould  Shaw,  who  set  the 
example  of  leaving  his  own  beloved  regiment  to  take 
command  of  a  coloured  regiment,  at  the  head  of  which 
he  died,  gallantly  leading  them  and  gallantly  followed 
by  them  in  a  desperate  fight. 

It  was  easier  to  raise  and  train  these  negro  soldiers 
than  to  arrange  for  the  control,  shelter,  and  employment 
of  the  other  refugees  who  crowded  especially  to  the 
protection  of  Grant's  army  in  the  West.  The  efforts 
made  for  their  benefit  cannot  be  related  here,  but  the 
recollections  of  Army  Chaplain  John  Eaton,  whom 
Grant  selected  to  take  charge  of  them  in  the  West, 
throw  a  little  more  light  on  Lincoln  and  on  the  spirit  of 


EMANCIPATION  329 

his  dealing  with  "'  the  nigger  question."  When  Eaton 
after  some  time  had  to  come  to  Washington,  upon  the 
business  of  his  charge  and  to  visit  the  President,  he 
received  that  impression,  of  versatile  power  and  of 
easy  mastery  over  many  details  as  well  as  over  broad 
issues,  which  many  who  worked  under  Lincoln  have 
described,  but  he  was  above  all  struck  with  the  fact 
that  from  a  very  slight  experience  in  early  life  Lincoln 
had  gained  a  knowledge  of  negro  character  such  as 
very  few  indeed  in  the  North  possessed.  He  was 
subjected  to  many  seemingly  trivial  questions,  of  which 
he  was  quick  enough  to  see  the  grave  purpose,  about 
all  sorts  of  persons  and  things  in  the  West,  but  he  was 
also  examined  closely,  in  a  way  which  commanded  his 
fullest  respect  as  an  expert,  about  the  ideas,  under 
standing,  and  expectations  of  the  ordinary  negroes 
under  his  care,  and  more  particularly  as  to  the  past 
history  and  the  attainments  of  the  few  negroes  who  had 
become  prominent  men,  and  who  therefore  best  illus 
trated  the  real  capacities  of  their  race.  Later  visits 
to  the  capital  and  to  Lincoln  deepened  this  impression, 
and  convinced  Eaton,  though  by  trifling  signs,  of  the 
rare  quality  of  Lincoln's  sympathy.  Once,  after  Eaton's 
difficult  business  had  been  disposed  of,  the  President 
turned  to  relating  his  own  recent  worries  about  a  colony 
of  negroes  which  he  was  trying  to  establish  on  a  small 
island  off  Hayti.  There  flourishes  in  Southern  latitudes 
a  minute  creature  called  Dermatophilus  penetrans,  or 
the  jigger,  which  can  inflict  great  pain  on  bare-footed 
people  by  housing  itself  under  their  toe-nails.  This 
Colony  had  a  plague  of  jiggers,  and  every  expedient  for 
defeating  them  had  failed.  Lincoln  was  not  merely 
giving  the  practical  attention  to  this  difficulty  that 
might  perhaps  be  expected  ;  the  Chaplain  was  amazed  to 
find  that  at  that  moment,  at  the  turning  point  of  the 
war,  a  few  days  only  after  Vicksburg  and  Gettysburg, 
with  his  enormous  pre-occupations,  the  President's  mind 
had  room  for  real  and  keen  distress  about  the  toes  of 
the  blacks  in  the  Cow  Island.  At  the  end  of  yet  another 
interview  Eaton  was  startled  by  the  question,  put  by 


330  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  President  with  an  air  of  shyness,  whether  Frederick 
Douglass,  a  well-known  negro  preacher,  could  be  induced 
to  visit  him.  Of  course  he  could.  Frederick  Douglass 
was  then  reputed  to  be  the  ablest  man  ever  born  as  a 
negro  slave  ;  he  must  have  met  many  of  the  best  and 
kindest  Northern  friends  of  the  negro  ;  and  he  went  to 
Lincoln  distressed  at  some  points  in  his  policy,  par 
ticularly  at  his  failure  to  make  reprisals  for  murders  of 
negro  prisoners  by  Southern  troops.  When  he  came 
away  he  was  in  a  state  little  short  of  ecstasy.  It  was 
not  because  he  now  understood,  as  he  did,  Lincoln's 
policy.  Lincoln  had  indeed  won  his  warm  approval  when 
he  told  him  "  with  a  quiver  in  his  voice  "  of  his  horror  of 
killing  men  in  cold  blood  for  what  had  been  done  by 
others,  and  his  dread  of  what  might  follow  such  a  policy ; 
but  he  had  a  deeper  gratification,  the  strangeness  of 
which  it  is  sad  to  realise.  "  He  treated  me  as  a  man," 
exclaimed  Douglass.  "He  did  not  let  me  feel  for  a 
moment  that  there  was  any  difference  in  the  colour  of 
our  skins." 

Perhaps  the  hardest  effort  of  speech  that  Lincoln 
ever  essayed  was  an  address  to  negroes  which  had  to  do 
with  this  very  subject  of  colour.  His  audience  were 
men  who  had  been  free  from  birth  or  for  some  time  and 
were  believed  to  be  leaders  among  their  community. 
It  was  Lincoln's  object  to  induce  some  of  them  to  be 
pioneers  in  an  attempt  at  colonisation  in  some  suit 
able  climate,  an  attempt  which  he  felt  must  fail  if  it 
started  with  negroes  whose  "  intellects  were  clouded 
by  slavery."  He  clung  to  these  projects  of  colonisa 
tion,  as  probably  the  best  among  the  various  means  by 
which  the  improvement  of  the  negro  must  be  attempted, 
because  their  race,  "  suffering  the  greatest  wrong  ever 
inflicted  on  any  people,"  would  "  yet  be  far  removed 
from  being  on  an  equality  with  the  white  race  "  when 
they  ceased  to  be  slaves  ;  a  "  physical  difference 
broader  than  exists  between  almost  any  other  two  races  " 
and  constituting  "  a  great  disadvantage  to  us  both," 
would  always  set  a  "  ban  "  upon  the  negroes  even  where 
they  were  best  treated  in  America.  This  unpalatable 


EMANCIPATION  331 

fact  he  put  before  them  with  that  total  absence  of 
pretence  which  was  probably  the  only  possible  form  of 
tact  in  such  a  discussion,  with  no  affectation  of  a  hope 
that  progress  would  remove  it  or  of  a  desire  that  the 
ordinary  white  man  should  lose  the  instinct  that  kept 
him  apart  from  the  black.  But  this  only  makes  more 
apparent  his  simple  recognition  of  an  equality  and 
fellowship  which  did  exist  between  him  and  his  hearers 
in  a  larger  matter  than  that  of  social  intercourse  or 
political  combination.  His  appeal  to  their  capacity  for 
taking  large  and  unselfish  views  was  as  direct  and  as 
confident  as  in  his  addresses  to  his  own  people  ;  it  was 
made  in  the  language  of  a  man  to  whom  the  public 
spirit  which  might  exist  among  black  people  was  of  the 
same  quality  as  that  which  existed  among  white,  in 
whose  belief  he  and  his  hearers  could  equally  find 
happiness  in  "  being  worthy  of  themselves  "  and  in 
realising  the  "  claim  of  kindred  to  the  great  God  who 
made  them." 

It  may  be  well  here,  without  waiting  to  trace  further 
the  course  of  the  war,  in  which  at  the  point  where  we 
left  it  the  slow  but  irresistible  progress  of  conquest  was 
about  to  set  in,  to  recount  briefly  the  later  stages  of  the 
abolition  of  slavery  in  America.  In  1863  it  became 
apparent  that  popular  feeling  in  Missouri  and  in  Mary 
land  was  getting  ripe  for  abolition.  Bills  were  introduced 
into  Congress  to  compensate  their  States  if  they  did 
away  with  slavery  ;  the  compensation  was  to  be  larger 
if  the  abolition  was  immediate  and  not  gradual.  There 
was  a  majority  in  each  House  for  these  Bills,  but  the 
Democratic  minority  was  able  to  kill  them  in  the 
House  of  Representatives  by  the  methods  of  "  fili 
bustering,"  or,  as  we  call  it,  obstruction,  to  which  the 
procedure  of  that  body  seems  well  adapted.  The 
Republican  majority  had  not  been  very  zealous  for  the 
Bills ;  its  members  asked  "why  compensate  for  a  wrong" 
which  they  had  begun  to  feel  would  soon  be  abolished 
without  compensation  ;  but  their  leaders  at  least  did 
their  best  for  the  Bills.  It  would  have  been  idle  after 
the  failure  of  these  proposals  to  introduce  the  Bills  that 


332  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

had  been  contemplated  for  buying  out  the  loyal  slave 
owners  in  West  Virginia,  Kentucky,  and  Tennessee, 
which  was  now  fast  being  regained  for  the  Union. 
Lincoln  after  his  Message  of  December,  1862,  recog 
nised  it  as  useless  for  him  to  press  again  the  principles 
of  gradual  emancipation  or  of  compensation,  as  to 
which  it  is  worth  remembrance  that  the  compensation 
which  he  proposed  was  for  loyal  and  disloyal  owners 
alike.  His  Administration,  however,  bought  every 
suitable  slave  in  Delaware  for  service  (service  as  a  free 
man)  in  the  Army.  In  the  course  of  1864  a  remark 
able  development  of  public  opinion  began  to  be  manifest 
in  the  States  chiefly  concerned.  In  the  autumn  of 
that  year  Maryland,  whose  representatives  had  paid  so 
little  attention  to  Lincoln  two  years  before,  passed  an 
Amendment  to  the  State  Constitution  abolishing  slavery 
without  compensation.  A  movement  in  the  same 
direction  was  felt  to  be  making  progress  in  Kentucky 
and  Tennessee ;  and  Missouri  followed  Maryland's 
example  in  January,  1865.  Meanwhile  Louisiana  had 
been  reconquered,  and  the  Unionists  in  these  States, 
constantly  encouraged  and  protected  by  Lincoln  when 
Congress  looked  upon  them  somewhat  coldly  or  his 
generals  showed  jealousy  of  their  action,  had  banded 
themselves  together  to  form  State  Governments  with 
Constitutions  that  forbade  slavery.  Lincoln,  it  may  be 
noted,  had  suggested  to  Louisiana  that  it  would  be 
well  to  frame  some  plan  by  which  the  best  educated  of 
the  negroes  should  be  admitted  to  the  franchise.  Four 
years  after  his  death  a  Constitutional  Amendment  was 
passed  by  which  any  distinction  as  to  franchise  on  the 
ground  of  race  or  colour  is  forbidden  in  America.  The 
policy  of  giving  the  vote  to  negroes  indiscriminately  had 
commended  itself  to  the  cold  pedantry  of  some  persons, 
including  Chase,  on  the  ground  of  some  natural  right  of 
all  men  to  the  suffrage ;  but  it  was  adopted  as  the  most 
effective  protection  for  the  negroes  against  laws,  as  to 
vagrancy  and  the  like,  by  which  it  was  feared  they 
might  practically  be  enslaved  again.  Whatever  the 
excuse  for  it,  it  would  seem  to  have  proved  in  fact  a 


EMANCIPATION  333 

great  obstacle  to  healthy  relations  between  the  two 
races.  The  true  policy  in  such  a  matter  is  doubtless 
that  which  Rhodes  and  other  statesmen  adopted  in  the 
Cape  Colony  and  which  Lincoln  had  advocated  in  the 
case  of  Louisiana.  It  would  be  absurd  to  imagine  that 
the  spirit  which  could  champion  the  rights  of  the  negro 
and  yet  face  fairly  the  abiding  difficulty  of  his  case  died 
in  America  with  Lincoln,  but  it  lost  for  many  a  year 
to  come  its  only  great  exponent. 

But  the  question  of  overwhelming  importance,  be 
tween  the  principles  of  slavery  and  of  freedom,  was  ready 
for  final  decision  when  local  opinion  in  six  slave  States 
was  already  moving  as  we  have  seen.  The  Republican 
Convention  of  1864,  which  again  chose  Lincoln  as  its 
candidate  for  the  Presidency,  declared  itself  in  favour  of 
a  Constitutional  Amendment  to  abolish  slavery  once  for 
all  throughout  America.  Whether  the  first  suggestion 
came  from  him  or  not,  it  is  known  that  Lincoln's  private 
influence  was  energetically  used  to  procure  this  reso 
lution  of  the  Convention.  In  his  Message  to  Congress  in 
1 864  he  urged  the  initiation  of  this  Amendment.  Obser 
vation  of  elections  made  it  all  but  certain  that  the  next 
Congress  would  be  ready  to  take  this  action,  but  Lincoln 
pleaded  with  the  present  doubtful  Congress  for  the 
advantage  which  would  be  gained  by  ready,  and  if 
possible,  unanimous,  concurrence  in  the  North  in  the 
course  which  would  soon  prevail.  The  necessary  Reso 
lution  was  passed  in  the  Senate,  but  in  the  House  of 
Representatives  till  within  a  few  hours  of  the  vote  it 
was  said  to  be  "  the  toss  of  a  copper  "  whether  the 
majority  of  two-thirds,  required  for  such  a  purpose, 
would  be  obtained.  In  the  efforts  made  on  either 
side  to  win  over  the  few  doubtful  voters  Lincoln 
had  taken  his  part.  Right  or  wrong,  he  was  not  the 
man  to  see  a  great  and  beneficent  Act  in  danger  of 
postponement  without  being  tempted  to  secure  it  if 
he  could  do  so  by  terrifying  some  unprincipled  and 
white-livered  opponents.  With  the  knowledge  that  he 
was  always  acquiring  of  the  persons  in  politics,  he  had 
been  able  to  pick  out  two  Democratic  Congressmen  who 


334  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

were  fit  for  his  purpose — presumably  they  lay  under 
suspicion  of  one  of  those  treasonable  practices  which 
martial  law  under  Lincoln  treated  very  unceremoniously. 
He  sent  for  them.  He  told  them  that  the  gaining  of  a 
certain  number  of  doubtful  votes  would  secure  the 
Resolution.  He  told  them  that  he  was  President  of  the 
United  States.  He  told  them  that  the  President  of  the 
United  States  in  war  time  exercised  great  and  dreadful 
powers.  And  he  told  them  that  he  looked  to  them 
personally  to  get  him  those  votes.  Whether  this  wrong 
manoeuvre  affected  the  result  or  not,  on  January  31, 
1865,  the  Resolution  was  passed  in  the  House  by  a  two- 
thirds  majority  with  a  few  votes  to  spare,  and  the 
great  crowd  in  the  galleries,  defying  all  precedent,  broke 
out  in  a  demonstration  of  enthusiasm  which  some  still 
recall  as  the  most  memorable  scene  in  their  lives.  On 
December  18  of  that  year,  when  Lincoln  had  been 
eight  months  dead,  William  Seward,  as  Secretary  of 
State,  was  able  to  certify  that  the  requisite  majority  of 
States  had  passed  the  Thirteenth  Amendment  to  the 
Constitution,  and  the  cause  of  that  "  irrepressible 
conflict  "  which  he  had  foretold,  and  in  which  he  had 
played  a  weak  but  valuable  part,  was  for  ever  ex 
tinguished. 

At  the  present  day,  alike  in  the  British  Empire  and  in 
America,  the  unending  difficulty  of  wholesome  human 
relations  between  races  of  different  and  unequal  develop 
ment  exercises  many  minds  ;  but  this  difficulty  can 
not  obscure  the  great  service  done  by  those  who, 
first  in  England  and  later  and  more  hardly  in  America, 
stamped  out  that  cardinal  principle  of  error  that  any 
race  is  without  its  human  claim.  Among  these  men 
William  Lloyd  Garrison  lived  to  see  the  fruit  of  his 
labours,  and  to  know  and  have  friendly  intercourse 
with  Lincoln.  There  have  been  some  comparable 
instances  in  which  men  with  such  different  characters  and 
methods  have  unconsciously  conspired  for  a  common 
end,  as  these  two  did  when  Garrison  was  projecting  the 
"  Liberator  "  and  Lincoln  began  shaping  himself  for 
honourable  public  work  in  the  vague.  The  part  that 


EMANCIPATION  335 

Lincoln  played  in  these  events  did  not  seem  to  him  a 
personal  achievement  of  his  own.  He  appeared  to 
himself  rather  as  an  instrument.  "  I  claim  not,"  he 
once  said  in  this  connection,  "  to  have  controlled  events, 
but  confess  plainly  that  events  have  controlled  me." 
In  1864,  when  a  petition  was  sent  to  him  from  some 
children  that  there  should  be  no  more  child  slaves,  he 
wrote,  "  Please  tell  these  little  people  that  I  am  very  glad 
their  young  hearts  are  so  full  of  just  and  generous  sym 
pathy,  and  that,  while  I  have  not  the  power  to  grant  all 
they  ask,  I  trust  they  will  remember  that  God  has,  and 
that,  as  it  seems,  He  wills  to  do  it."  Yet,  at  least,  he 
redeemed  the  boyish  pledge  that  has  been,  fancifully  per 
haps,  ascribed  to  him  ;  each  opportunity  that  to  his 
judgment  ever  presented  itself  of  striking  some  blow  for 
human  freedom  was  taken  ;  the  blows  were  timed  and 
directed  by  the  full  force  of  his  sagacity,  and  they  were 
never  restrained  by  private  ambition  or  fear.  It  is 
probable  that  upon  that  cool  review,  which  in  the  case 
of  this  singular  figure  is  difficult,  the  sense  of  his 
potent  accomplishment  would  not  diminish,  but  increase. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE    APPROACH    *F   VICTORY 

I.  The  War  to  the  End  of  1863. 

THE  events  of  the  Eastern  theatre  of  war  have  been 
followed  into  the  early  summer  of  1863,  when  Lee  was  for 
the  second  time  about  to  invade  the  North.  The  Western 
theatre  of  war  has  been  left  unnoticed  since  the  end  of 
May,  1862.  From  that  time  to  the  end  of  the  year  no 
definite  progress  was  made  here  by  either  side,  but  here 
also  the  perplexities  of  the  military  administration  were 
considerable ;  and  in  Lincoln's  life  it  must  be  noted  that 
in  these  months  the  strain  of  anxiety  about  the  Eastern 
army  and  about  the  policy  of  emancipation  was  accom 
panied  by  acute  doubt  in  regard  to  the  conduct  of  war 
in  the  West. 

When  Halleck  had  been  summoned  from  the  West, 
Lincoln  had  again  a  general  by  his  side  in  Washington  to 
exercise  command  under  him  of  all  the  armies.  Halleck 
was  a  man  of  some  intellectual  distinction  who  might 
be  expected  to  take  a  broad  view  of  the  war  as  a  whole ; 
this  and  his  freedom  from  petty  feelings,  as  to  which 
Lincoln's  known  opinion  of  him  can  be  corroborated, 
doubtless  made  him  useful  as  an  adviser  ;  nor  for  a 
considerable  time  was  there  any  man  with  apparently 
better  qualifications  for  his  position.  But  Lincoln  soon 
found,  as  has  been  seen,  that  Halleck  lacked  energy  of 
will,  and  cannot  have  been  long  in  discovering  that  his 
judgment  was  not  very  good.  The  President  had  thus 
to  make  the  best  use  he  could  of  expert  advice  upon  which 
he  would  not  have  been  justified  in  relying  very  fully. 

When  Halleck  arrived  at  Corinth  at  the  end  of  May, 
1862,  the  whole  of  Western  and  Middle  Tennessee  was 
for  the  time  clear  of  the  enemy,  and  he  turned  his  atten- 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  337 

tion  at  once  to  the  long  delayed  project  of  rescuing  the 
Unionists  in  Eastern  Tennessee,  which  was  occupied  by 
a  Confederate  army  under  General  Kirby  Smith.  His 
object  was  to  seize  Chattanooga,  which  lay  about  150 
miles  to  the  east  of  him,  and  invade  Eastern  Tennessee 
by  way  of  the  valley  of  the  Tennessee  River,  which  cuts 
through  the  mountains  behind  Chattanooga.  With  this 
in  view  he  would  doubtless  have  been  wise  if  he  had 
first.continued  his  advance  with  his  whole  force  against 
the  Confederate  army  under  Beauregard,  which  after 
evacuating  Corinth  had  fallen  back  to  rest  and  recruit 
in  a  far  healthier  situation  50  miles  further  south. 
Beauregard  would  have  been  obliged  either  to  fight  him 
with  inferior  numbers  or  to  shut  himself  up  in  the  fortress 
of  Vicksburg.  As  it  was,  Halleck  spent  the  month  of 
June  merely  in  repairing  the  railway  line  which  runs  from 
Corinth  in  the  direction  of  Chattanooga.  When  he  was 
called  to  Washington  he  left  Grant,  who  for  several 
months  past  had  been  kept  idle  as  his  second  in  command, 
in  independent  command  of  a  force  which  was  to  remain 
near  the  Mississippi  confronting  Beauregard,  but  he 
restricted  him  to  a  merely  defensive  part  by  ordering 
him  to  keep  a  part  of  his  army  ready  to  send  to  Buelll 
whenever  that  general  needed  it,  as  he  soon  did.  Buejly 
who  again  took  over  his  former  independent  command, 
was  ordered  by  Halleck  to  advance  on  Chattanooga, 
using  Corinth  as  his  base  of  supply.  Buell  had  wished 
that  the  base  for  the  advance  upon  Chattanooga  should 
be  transferred  to  Nashville,  in  the  centre  of  Tennessee, 
in  which  case  the  line  of  railway  communication  would 
have  been  shorter  and  also  less  exposed  to  raids  by  the 
Southern  cavalry.  After  Halleck  had  gone,  Buell 
obtained  permission  to  effect  this  change  of  base.  The 
whole  month  of  June  had  been  wasted  in  repairing  the 
railway  with  a  view  to  Halleck's  faulty  plan.  When 
Buell  himself  was  allowed  to  proceed  on  his  own  lines  and 
was  approaching  Chattanooga,  his  communications  with 
Nashville  were  twice,  in  the  middle  of  July  and  in  the 
middle  of  August,  cut  by  Confederate  cavalry  raids,  which 
did  such  serious  damage  as  to  impose  great  delay  upon 


33®  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

him.  In  the  end  of  August  and  beginning  of  September 
Kirby  Smith,  whose  army  had  been  strengthened  by 
troops  transferred  from  Beauregard,  crossed  the  moun 
tains  from  East  Tennessee  by  passes  some  distance 
north-east  of  Chattanooga,  and  invaded  Kentucky,  send 
ing  detachments  to  threaten  Louisville  on  the  Indiana 
border  of  Kentucky  and  Cincinnati  in  Ohio.  It  was 
necessary  for  Buell  to  retreat,  when,  after  a  week  or  more 
of  uncertainty,  it  became  clear  that  Kirby  Smith's  main 
force  was  committed  to  this  invasion.  Meanwhile 
General  Bragg,  who,  owing  to  the  illness  of  Beauregard, 
had  succeeded  to  his  command,  left  part  of  his  force  to 
hold  Grant  in  check,  marched  with  the  remainder  to 
support  .Kirby  Smith,  and  succeeded  in  placing  himself 
between  Buell' s  army  and  Louisville,  to  protect  which 
from  Kirby  Smith  had  become  Buell' s  first  object.  It 
seems  that  Bragg,  who  could  easily  have  been  reinforced 
by  Kirby  Smith,  had  now  an  opportunity  of  fighting  Buell 
with  great  advantage.  But  the  Confederate  generals, 
who  mistakenly  believed  that  Kentucky  was  at  heart 
with  them,  saw  an  imaginary  political  gain  in  occupying 
Frankfort,  the  State  capital,  and  formally  setting  up  a 
new  State  Government  there.  Bragg  therefore  marched 
on  to  join  Kirby  Smith  at  Frankfort,  which  was  well  to 
the  east  of  BuelPs  line  of  retreat,  and  Buell  was  able  to 
reach  Louisville  unopposed  by  September  25. 

These  events  were  watched  in  the  North  with  all  the 
more  anxiety  because  the  Confederate  invasion  of  Ken 
tucky  began  just  about  the  time  of  the  second  battle  of 
Bull  Run,  and  Buell  arrived  at  Louisville  within  a  week 
after  the  battle  of  Antietam  while  people  were  wondering 
how  that  victory  would  be  followed  up.  Men  of  intelli 
gence  and  influence,  especially  in  the  Western  States,  we  re 
loud  in  their  complaints  of  Buell's  want  of  vigour.  It  is 
remarkable  that  the  Unionists  of  Kentucky,  who  suffered 
the  most  through  his  supposed  faults,  expressed  their  con 
fidence  in  him  ;  but  his  own  soldiers  did  not  like  him,  for 
he  was  a  strict  disciplinarian  without  either  tact  or  any 
quality  which  much  impressed  them.  Their  reports  to 
their  homes  in  Ohio,  Indiana,  and  Illinois,  from  which 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  339 

they  mostly  came,  increased   the   feeling  against  him 
which  was  arising  in  those  States,  and  his  relations  with 
the  Governors  of  Ohio  and  Indiana,  who  were  busy  in 
sending  him  recruits  and  whose  States  were  threatened 
with  invasion,  seem,  wherever  the  fault  may  have  lain, 
to  have  been  unfortunate.     BuelPs  most  powerful  friend 
had  been  McClellan,  and  by  an  irrational  but  unavoidable 
process   of  thought  the   real  dilatoriness   of  McClellan 
became  an  argument  for  blaming  Buell  as  well.     Halleck 
defended  him  loyally,  but  this  by  now  probably  seemed 
to  Lincoln  the  apology  of  one  irresolute  man  for  another. 
Stanton,  whose  efficiency  in  the  business  of  the  War 
Department  gave  him  great  weight,  had  become  eager 
for  the  removal  of  Buell.     Lincoln  expected  that  as  soon 
as  Buell  could  cover  Louisville  he  would  take  the  offen 
sive  promptly.     His  army  appears  to  have  exceeded  in 
numbers,  though  not  very  much,  the  combined  forces  of 
Bragg  and  Kirby  Smith,  and  except  as  to  cavalry  it  was 
probably  as  good  in  quality.     If  energetically  used  by 
Halleck  some  months  before,  the  Western  armies  should 
have  been  strong  enough  to  accomplish  great  results  ; 
and  if  the  attempt  had  been  made  at  first  to  raise  much 
larger  armies,  it  seems  likely  that  the  difficulties  of  train 
ing  and  organisation'  and  command  would  have  increased 
out  of  proportion  to  any  gain.      Buell   remained  some 
days  at  Louisville  itself,  receiving  reinforcements  which 
were  considerable,  but  consisted  mainly  of  raw  recruits. 
While  he  was  there  orders  arrived  from  Lincoln  remov 
ing  him  and  appointing  his  second  in  command,  the  Vir 
ginian  Thomas,  in  his  place.     This  was  a  wise  choice  ; 
Thomas  was  one  of  the  four  Northern  generals  who  won 
abiding  distinction  in  the  Civil  War.     But  Thomas  felt 
the  injustice  which  was  done  to  Buell,  and  he  refused 
the  command  in  a  letter  magnanimously  defending  him. 
The  fact  was  that  Lincoln  had  rescinded  his  orders  before 
they  were  received,  for  he  had  issued  them  under  the 
belief  that  Buell  was  remaining  on  the   defensive,  but 
learnt  immediately  that  an  offensive  movement  was  in 
progress,  and  had  no  intention  of  changing  commanders 
under  those  circumstances. 


Z2 


340  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

On  October  8  a  battle,  which  began  in  an  acci 
dental  minor  conflict,  took  place  between  Buell  with 
58,000  men  and  Bragg  with  considerably  less  than 
half  that  number  of  tried  veterans.  Buell  made  little 
use  of  his  superior  numbers,  for  which  the  fault  may 
have  lain  with  the  corps  commander  who  first  became 
engaged  and  who  did  not  report  at  once  to  him  ;  the 
part  of  BuelTs  army  which  bore  the  brunt  of  the  fighting 
suffered  heavy  losses,  which  made  a  painful  impression 
in  the  North,  and  the  public  outcry  against  him,  which 
had  begun  as  soon  as  Kentucky  was  invaded  by  the 
Confederates,  now  increased.  After  the  battle  Bragg 
fell  back  and  effected  a  junction  with  Kirby  Smith.  Their 
joint  forces  were  not  very  far  inferior  to  Buell's  in 
numbers,  but  after  a  few  more  days  Bragg  determined  to 
evacuate  Kentucky,  in  which  his  hope  of  raising  many 
recruits  had  been  disappointed.  Buell,  on  perceiving 
his  intention,  pursued  him  some  distance,  but,  finding 
the  roads  bad  for  the  movement  of  large  bodies  of  troops, 
finally  took  up  a  position  at  Bowling  Green,  on  the  rail 
way  to  the  north  of  Nashville,  intending  later  in  the 
autumn  to  move  a  little  south  of  Nashville  and  there  to 
wait  for  the  spring  before  again  moving  on  Chattanooga. 
He  was  urged  from  Washington  to  press  forward  towards 
Chattanooga  at  once,  but  replied  decidedly  that  he  was 
unable  to  do  so,  and  added  that  if  a  change  of  command 
was  desired  the  present  was  a  suitable  time  for  it.  At 
the,  end  of  October  he  was  removed  from  command.  In 
the  meantime  the  Confederate  forces  that  had  been  left 
to  oppose  Grant  had  attacked  him  and  been  signally 
defeated  in  two  engagements,  in  each  of  which  General 
Rosecrans,  who  was  serving  under  Grant,  was  in  imme 
diate  command  on  the  Northern  side.  Rosecrans,  who 
therefore  began  to  be  looked  upon  as  a  promising  general, 
and  indeed  was  one  of  those  who,  in  the  chatter  of  the 
time,  were  occasionally  spoken  of  as  suitable  for  a  "  mili 
tary  dictatorship,"  was  now  put  in  Buell's  place,  which 
Thomas  had  once  refused.  He  advanced  to  Nashville,  but 
was  as  firm  as  Buell  in  refusing  to  go  further  till  he  had 
accumulated  rations  enough  to  make  him  for  a  time  inde- 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  341 

pendent  of  the  railway.  Ultimately  he  moved  on  Mur- 
freesborough,  some  thirty  miles  further  in  the  direction  of 
Chattanooga.  Here  on  December  31,  1862,  Bragg,  with 
somewhat  inferior  numbers,  attacked  him  and  gained  an 
initial  success,  which  Rosecrans  and  his  subordinates 
Thomas  and  Sheridan,  were  able  to  prevent  him  from 
making  good.  Bragg's  losses  were  heavy,  and,  after 
waiting  a  few  days  in  the  hope  that  Rosecrans  might 
retreat  first,  he  fell  back  to  a  point  near  the  Cumberland 
mountains  a  little  in  advance  of  Chattanooga.  Thus  the 
battle  of  Murfreesborough  counted  as  a  victory  to  the 
North,  a  slight  set-off  to  the  disaster  at  Fredericksburg 
a  little  while  before.  But  it  had  no  very  striking  con 
sequences.  For  over  six  months  Rosecrans  proceeded 
no  further.  The  Northern  armies  remained  in  more 

rt 

secure  possession  of  all  Tennessee  west  of  the  mountains 
than  they  had  obtained  in  the  first  half  of  1 862  ;  but  the 
length  of  their  communications  and  the  great  superiority 
of  the  South  in  cavalry,  which  could  threaten  those  com 
munications,  suspended  their  further  advance.  Lincoln 
urged  that  their  army  could  subsist  on  the  country  which 
it  invaded,  but  Buell  and  Rosecrans  treated  the  idea  as 
impracticable  ;  in  fact,  till  a  little  later  all  Northern 
generals  so  regarded  it. 

Thus  Chattanooga,  which  it  was  hoped  would  be 
occupied  soon  after  Halleck  had  occupied  Corinth, 
remained  in  Southern  hands  for  more  than  a  year  after 
that,  notwithstanding  the  removal  of  Buell,  to  whom 
this  disappointment  and  the  mortifying  invasion  of 
Kentucky  were  at  first  attributed.  This  was  rightly 
felt  to  be  unsatisfactory,  but  the  chief  blame  that  can 
now  be  imputed  falls  upon  the  mistakes  of  Halleck 
while  he  was  ^still  commanding  in  the  West.  There 
is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  Buell  had  any  excep 
tional  amount  of  intuition  or  of  energy  and  it  was 
right  to  demand  that  a  general  with  both  these  qualities 
should  be  appointed  if  he  could  be  found.  But  he  was 
at  least  a  prudent  officer,  of  fair  capacity,  doing  his  best. 
The  criticisms  upon  him,  of  which  the  well  informed  were 
lavish,  were  uttered  without  appreciation  of  practical 


342  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

difficulties  or  of  the  standard  by  which  he  was  really  to 
be  judged.  So,  with  far  more  justice  than  McClellan, 
he  has  been  numbered  among  the  misused  generals. 
Lincoln,  there  is  no  doubt,  had  watched  his  proceedings, 
as  he  watched  those  of  Rosecrans  after  him,  with  a 
feeling  of  impatience,  and  set  him  down  as  unenterprising 
and  obstinate.  In  one  point  his  Administration  was 
much  to  blame  in  its  treatment  of  the  Western  com 
manders.  It  became  common  political  talk  that  the 
way  to  get  victories  was  to  treat  unsuccessful  generals 
almost  as  harshly  as  the  French  in  the  Revolution 
were  understood  to  have  treated  them.  Lincoln  did 
not  go  thus  far,  but  it  was  probably  with  his  authority 
that  before  Buell  was  removed  Halleck,  with  reluctance 
on  his  own  part,  wrote  a  letter  referring  to  this  prevalent 
idea  and  calculated  to  put  about  among  the  Western 
commanders  ian  expectation  that  whichever  of  them  first 
did  something  notable  would  be  put  over  his  less  success 
ful  colleagues.  Later  on,  and,  as  we  can  hardly  doubt, 
with  Lincoln's  consent,  Grant  and  Rosecrans  were  each 
informed  that  the  first  of  them  to  win  a  victory  would  get 
the  vacant  major-generalship  in  the  United  States  Army 
in  place  of  his  present  volunteer  rank.  This  was  not  the 
way  to  handle  men  with  proper  professional  pride,  and 
it  is  one  of  those  cases,  which  are  strangely  few,  where 
Lincoln  made  the  sort  of  mistake  that  might  have  been 
expected  from  his  want  of  training  and  not  from  his 
native  generosity.  But  in  the  main  his  treatment  of 
this  difficult  question  was  sound.  Sharing  as  he  did  the 
prevailing  impatience  with  Buell,  he  had  no  intention  of 
yielding  to  it  till  there  was  a  real  prospect  that  a  change 
of  generals  would  be  a  change  for  the  better.  When  the 
appointment  of  Thomas  was  proposed  there  really  was 
such  a  prospect.  When  Rosecrans  was  eventually  put 
in  BuelPs  place  the  result  was  disappointing  to  Lincoln, 
but  it  was  evidently  not  a  bad  appointment',  and  a 
situation  had  then  arisen  in  which  it  would  have  been 
folly  to  retain  Buell  if  any  capable  successor  to  him  could 
be  found  ;  for  the  Governors  of  Indiana,  Ohio  and 
Illinois,  of  whom  the  first  named  was  reputed  the  ablest 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  343 

of  the  "  war  Governors  "  in  the  West,  and  on  whom  his 
army  depended  for  recruits,  now  combined  in  representa 
tions  against  him  which  could  not  be  ignored.     Lincoln, 
who   could   not   have   personal  acquaintance   with  .the 
generals  of  the  Western  armies  as  he  had  with  those  in  the 
East,  was,  it  should  be  observed,  throughout  unceasing 
in  his  efforts  to  get  the  fullest  and  clearest  impression  of 
them  that  he  could  ;   he  was  always,  as  it  has  been  put, 
"  taking  measurements  "  of  men,  and  a  good  deal  of 
what  seemed  idle  and  gossipy  talk  with  chance  visitors, 
who   could   tell  him  little   incidents   or  give   him   new 
impressions,  seems   to   have   had   this   serious  purpose. 
For  the  first  half  of  the  war  the  choice  of  men  for  high 
commands  was  the  most  harassing  of  all  the  difficulties 
of  his  administration.     There  is  no  doubt  of  his  constant 
watchfulness  to  discern  and  promote  merit.     He  was 
certainly  beset  by  the  feeling  that  generals  were  apt  to 
be  wanting  in  the  vigour  and  boldness  which  the  conduct 
of  the  war  demanded,  but,  though  this  in  some  cases 
probably  misled  him,  upon  the  whole  there  was  good 
reason  for  it.     On  the  other  hand  it  must  be  considered 
that    all    this    while    he    knew    himself    to    be    losing 
influence  through  his  supposed  want   of  energy  in  the 
war,  and  that   he   was    under    strong    and    unceasing 
pressure  from  every  influential  quarter  to  dismiss  every 
general  who  caused  disappointment.      Newspapers   and 
private  letters  of  the  time  demonstrate  that  there  was 
intense    impatience    against    him     for    not    producing 
victorious  generals.     This  being  so,  his  own  patience  in 
this  matter  and  his  resolution  to  give  those  under  him 
a  fair  chance  appear  very  remarkable  and  were  certainly 
very  wise. 

We  have  come,  however,  to  the  end,  not  of  all  the 
clamour  against  Lincoln,  but  of  his  own  worst  perplexi 
ties.  In  passing  to  the  operations  further  west  we  are 
passing  to  an  instance  in  which  Lincoln  felt  it  right  to 
stand  to  the  end  by  a  decried  commander,  and  that 
decried  commander  proved  to  possess  the  very  qualities 
for  which  he  had  vainly  looked  in  others.  The  reverse 
side  of  General  Grant's  fame  is  well  enough  known  to  the 


344  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

world.     Before  the  war  he  had  been  living  under  a  cloud. 
In  the  autumn  of   1862,  while  his  army  lay  between 
Corinth   and   Memphis,    the    cloud    still   rested    on   his 
reputation.     In  spite   of  the  glory  he  had  won  for  a 
moment  at  Fort  Donelson,  large  circles  were  ready  to 
speak  of  him  simply  as  an  "  incompetent  and  disagreeable 
man."     The  crowning  work  of  his  life  was  accomplished 
with  terrible  bloodshed  which  was  often  attributed  to 
callousness  and  incapacity  on  his  part.     The  eight  years 
of  his  Presidency  afterwards,  which  cannot  properly  be 
discussed  here,  added  at  the  best  no  lustre  to  his  memory. 
Later  still,  when  he  visited  Europe  as  a  celebrity  the 
general  impression  which  he  created  seems  to  be  con 
tained  in  the  words  "  a  rude  man."     Thus  the  Grant  that 
we  discover  in  the  recollections  of  a  few  loyal  and  loving 
friends,  and  in  the  memoirs  which  he  himself  began  when 
late  in  life  he  lost  his  money  and  which  he  finished  with 
the  pains  of  death  upon  him,  is  a  surprising,  in  some  ways 
pathetic,  figure.     He  had  been  a  shy  country  boy,  ready 
enough  at  all  the  work  of  a  farm  and  good  with  horses, 
but  with  none  of  the  business  aptitude  that  make  a 
successful  farmer,  when  his  father  made  him  go  to  West 
Point.     Here  he  showed  no  great  promise  and  made  few 
friends  ;    his  health  became  delicate,  and  he  wanted  to 
leave  the  army  and  become  a  teacher  of  mathematics. 
But  the  Mexican  War,  one  of  the  most  unjust  in  all 
history  as  he  afterwards  said,  broke  out,  and — so  he  later 
thought — saved  his  life  from  consumption  by  keeping 
him  in  the  open  air.     After  that  he  did  retire,  failed  at 
farming  and  other  ventures,  and  at  thirty-nine,  when  the 
Civil  War  began,  was,  as  has  been  seen,  a  shabby-looking, 
shiftless  fellow,  pretty  far  gone  in  the  habit  of  drink,  and 
more  or  less  occupied  about  a  leather  business  of  his 
father's.     Rough    in    appearance    and    in    manner    he 
remained — the  very  opposite  of  smart,  the  very  opposite 
of  versatile,  the  very  opposite  of  expansive  in  speech  or 
social  intercourse.     Unlike  many  rough  people,  he  had  a 
really   simple   character — truthful,   modest,    and   kind  ; 
without  varied  interests,   or  complicated  emotions,   or 
much  sense  of  fun,  but  thinking  intensely  on  the  problems 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  345 

that  he  did  see  before  him,  and  in  his  silent  way  keenly 
sensitive  on  most  of  the  points  on  which  it  is  well  to  be 
sensitive.  His  friends  reckoned  up  the  very  few  occa 
sions  on  which  he  was  ever  seen  to  be  angry  ;  (  only  one 
could  be  recalled  on  which  he  was  angry  on  his  own 
account ;  the  cruelty  of  a  driver  to  animals  in  his  supply 
train,  heartless  neglect  in  carrying  out  the  arrangements 
he  had  made  for  the  comfort  of  the  sick  and  wounded, 
these  were  the  sort  of  occasions  which  broke  down  Grant's 
habitual  self-possession  and  good  temper.  "  He  was 
never  too  anxious,"  wrote  Chaplain  Eaton,  who,  having 
been  set  by  him  in  charge  of  the  negro  refugees  with  his 
army,  had  excellent  means  of  judging,  "  never  too  pre 
occupied  with  the  great  problems  that  beset  him,  to  take 
a  sincere  and  humane  interest  in  the  welfare  of  the  most 
subordinate  labourer  dependent  upon  him."  And  he 
had  delicacy  of  feeling  in  other  ways.  Once  in  the  crowd 
at  some  hotel,  in  which  he  mingled  an  undistinguished 
figure,  an  old  officer  under  him  tried  on  a  lecherous  story 
for  the  entertainment  of  the  General,  who  did  not  look 
the  sort  of  man  to  resent  it ;  Grant,  who  did  not  wish  to 
set  down  an  older  man  roughly,  and  had  no  ready  phrases, 
but  had,  as  it  happens,  a  sensitive  skin,  was  observed  to 
blush  to  the  roots  of  his  hair  in  exquisite  discomfort.  It 
would  be  easy  to  multiply  little  recorded  traits  of  this 
somewhat  unexpected  kind,  which  give  grace  to  the 
memory  of  his  determination  in  a  duty  which  became 
very  grim. 

The  simplicity  of  character  as  well  as  manner  which 
endeared  him  to  a  few  close  associates  was  probably  a 
very  poor  equipment  for  the  Presidency,  which,  from 
that  very  simplicity,  he  afterwards  treated  as  his  due  ; 
and  Grant  presented  in  some  ways  as  great  a  contrast  as 
can  be  imagined  to  the  large  and  complex  mind  of 
Lincoln.  But  he  was  the  man  that  Lincoln  had  yearned 
for.  Whatever  degree  of  military  skill  may  be  ascribed 
to  him,  he  had  in  the  fullest  measure  the  moral  attributes 
of  a  commander.  The  sense  that  the  war  could  be  put 
through  and  must  be  put  through  possessed  his  soul. 
He  was  insusceptible  to  personal  danger — at  least,  so 


346  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

observers  said,  though  he  himself  told  a  different  story— 
and  he  taught  himself  to  keep  a  quiet  mind  in  the  presence 
of  losses,  rout  in  battle,  or  failure  in  a  campaign.  It  was 
said  that  he  never  troubled  himself  with  fancies  as  to 
what  the  enemy  might  be  doing,  and  he  confessed  to 
having  constantly  told  himself  that  the  enemy  was  as 
much  afraid  of  him  as  he  of  the  enemy.  His  military 
talent  was  doubled  in  efficacy  by  his  indomitable  con 
stancy.  In  one  sense,  moreover,  and  that  a  wholly  good 
sense,  he  was  a  political  general ;  for  he  had  constantly 
before  his  mind  the  aims  of  the  Government  which 
employed  him,  perceiving  early  that  there  were  only 
two  possible  ends  to  the  war,  the  complete  subjugation 
of  the  South  or  the  complete  failure  of  the  Union ;  per 
ceiving  also  that  there  was  no  danger  of  exhausting  the 
resources  of  the  North  and  great  danger  of  discouraging 
its  spirit,  while  the  position  of  the  South  was  in  this 
respect  the  precise  contrary.  He  was  therefore  the 
better  able  to  serve  the  State  as  a  soldier,  because 
throughout  he  measured  by  a  just  standard  the  ulterior 
good  or  harm  of  success  or  failure  in  his  enterprises. 

The  affectionate  confidence  which  existed  between  Lee 
and  "  Stonewall  "  Jackson  till  the  latter  was  killed  at 
Chancellorsville  had  a  parallel  in  the  enduring  friendship 
which  sprung  up  between  Grant  and  his  principal 
subordinate  William  T.  Sherman,  who  was  to  bear  a 
hardly  less  momentous  part  than  his  own  in  the  conclu 
sion  of  the  war.  Sherman  was  a  man  of  quick  wits  and 
fancy,  bright  and  mercurial  disposition,  capable  of  being 
a  delightful  companion  to  children,  and  capable  of  being 
sharp  and  inconsiderate  to  duller  subordinates.  It  is  a 
high  tribute  both  to  this  brilliant  soldier  and  to  Grant 
himself  that  he  always  regarded  Grant  as  having  made 
him,  not  only  by  his  confidence  but  by  his  example. 

As  has  been  said,  Grant  was  required  to  remain  on  the 
defensive  between  Memphis  and  Corinth,  which  mark  the 
line  of  the  Northern  frontier  at  this  period,  while  Buell 
was  advancing  on  Chattanooga.  Later,  while  the  Con 
federates  were  invading  Kentucky  further  east,  attacks 
were  also  directed  against  Grant  to  keep  him  quiet. 


THE   APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  347 

These  were  defeated,  though  Grant  was  unable  to  follow 
up  his  success  at  the  time.  When  the  invasion  of  Ken 
tucky  had  collapsed  and  the  Confederates  under  Bragg 
were  retreating  before  Buell  and  his  successor  out  of 
Middle  Tennessee,  it  became  possible  for  Grant  and  for 
Halleck  and  the  Government  at  Washington  to  look  to 
completing  the  conquest  of  the  Mississippi  River.  The 
importance  to  the  Confederates  of  a  hold  upon  the  Missis 
sippi  has  been  pointed  out  ;  if  it  were  lost  the  whole  of 
far  South- West  would  manifestly  be  lost  with  it ;  in  the 
North,  on  the  other  hand,  public  sentiment  was  strongly 
set  upon  freeing  the  navigation  of  the  great  river.  The 
Confederacy  now  held  the  river  from  the  fortress  of 
Vicksburg,  which  after  taking  New  Orleans  Admiral 
Farragut  had  attacked  in  vain,  down  to  Port  Hudson, 
1 20  miles  further  south,  where  the  Confederate  forces 
had  since  then  seized  and  fortified  another  point  of 
vantage.  Vicksburg,  it  will  be  observed,  lies  175  to  180 
miles  south  of  Memphis,  or  from  Grand  Junction, 
between  Memphis  and  Corinth,  the  points  in  the  occupa 
tion  of  the  North  which  must  serve  Grant  as  a  base.  At 
Vicksburg  itself,  and  for  some  distance  south  of  it,  a  line 
of  bluffs  or  steep-sided  hills  lying  east  of  the  Mississippi 
comes  right  up  to  the  edge  of  the  river.  The  river  as  it 
approaches  these  bluffs  makes  a  sudden  bend  to  the 
north-east  and  then  again  to  the  south-west,  so  that  two 
successive  reaches  of  the  stream,  each  from  three  to  four 
milea  long,  were  commanded  by  the  Vicksburg  guns, 
200  feet  above  the  valley  ;  the  eastward  or  landward 
side  of  the  fortress  was  also  well  situated  for  defence. 
To  the  north  of  Vicksburg  the  country  on  the  east  side 
of  the  Mississippi  is  cut  up  by  innumerable  streams  and 
"  bayous  "  or  marshy  creeks,  winding  and  intersecting 
amid  a  dense  growth  of  cedars.  The  North,  with  a 
flotilla  under  Admiral  Porter,  commanded  the  Mississippi 
itself,  and  the  Northern  forces  could  freely  move  along  its 
western  shore  to  the  impregnable  river  face  of  Vicksburg  A 
beyond.  But  the  question  of  how  to  get  safely  to  tjhe  J 
assailable  side  of  Vicksburg  presented  formidable  dmi/j 
culty  to  Grant  and  to  the  Government.  /  / 


348  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Grant's  operations  began  in  November,  1862. 
Advancing  directly  southward  along  the  railway  from 
Memphis  with  the  bulk  of  his  forces,  he  after  a  while 
detached  Sherman  with  a  force  which  proceeded  down 
the  Mississippi  to  the  mouth  of  the  Yazoo,  a  little  north 
west  of  Vicksburg.  Here  Sherman  was  to  land,  and,  it 
was  hoped,  surprise  the  enemy  at  Vicksburg  itself  while 
the  bulk  of  the  enemy's  forces  were  fully  occupied  by 
Grant's  advance  from  the  north.  But  Grant's  lengthen 
ing  communications  were  cut  up  by  a  cavalry  raid,  and 
he  had  to  retreat,  while  Sherman  came  upon  an  enemy 
fully  prepared  and  sustained  a  defeat  a  fortnight  after 
Burnside's  defeat  at  Fredericksburg.  This  was  the  first 
of  a  long  series  of  failures  during  which  Grant,  who  for 
his  part  was  conspicuously  frank  and  loyal  in  his  rela 
tions  with  the  Government,  received  upon  the  whole 
the  fullest  confidence  and  support  from  them.  There 
occurred,  however,  about  this  time  an  incident  which  was 
trying  to  Grant,  and  of  which  the  very  simple  facts  must 
be  stated,  since  it  was  the  last  of  the  occasions  upon  which 
severe  criticism  of  Lincoln's  military  administration  has 
been  founded.  General  McClernand  was  an  ambitious 
Illinois  lawyer-politician  of  energy  and  courage  ;  he  was 
an  old  acquaintance  of  Lincoln's,  and  an  old  opponent ; 
since  the  death  of  Douglas  he  and  another  lawyer- 
politician,  Logan,  had  been  the  most  powerful  of  the 
Democrats  in  Illinois  ;  both  were  zealous  in  the  war  and 
had  joined  the  Army  upon  its  outbreak.  Logan  served 
as  a  general  under  Grant  with  confessed  ability.  It  must 
be  repeated  that,  North  and  South,  former  civilians  had 
to  be  placed  in  command  for  lack  of  enough  soldiers  of 
known  capacity  to  go  round,  and  that  many  of  them, 
like  Logan  and  like  the  Southern  general,  Polk,  who  was 
a  bishop  in  the  American  Episcopal  Church,  did  very 
good  service.  McClernand  had  early  obtained  high  rank 
and  had  shown  no  sign  as  yet  of  having  less  aptitude  for 
his  new  career  than  other  men  of  similar  antecedents. 
Grant,  however,  distrusted  him,  and  proved  to  be  right. 
In  October,  1862,  McClernand  came  to  Lincoln  with  an 
offer  of  his  personal  services  in  raising  troops  from  Illinois 


THE   APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  349 

Indiana  and  Iowa,  with  a  special  view  to  clearing  the 
Mississippi.  He  of  course  expected  to  be  himself 
employed  in  this  operation.  Recruiting  was  at  a  low 
ebb,  and  it  would  have  been  folly  to  slight  this  offer. 
McClernand  did  in  fact  raise  volunteers  to  the  number  of 
a  whole  army  corps.  He  was  placed  under  Grant  in 
command  of  the  expedition  down  the  Mississippi  which 
had  already  started  under  Sherman.  Sherman's  great 
promise  had  not  yet  been  proved  to  anyone  but  Grant ; 
he  appears  at  this  time  to  have  come  under  the  dis 
approval  of  the  Joint  Committee  of  Congress  on  the  War, 
and  the  newspaper  Press  had  not  long  before  announced, 
with  affected  regret,  the  news  that  he  had  become 
insane.  McClernand,  arriving  just  after  Sherman's 
defeat  near  Vicksburg,  fell  in  at  once  with  a  suggestion 
of  his  to  attack  the  Post  of  Arkansas,  a  Confederate 
stronghold  in  the  State  of  Arkansas  and  upon  the  river 
of  that  name,  from  the  shelter  of  which  Confederate 
gunboats  had  some  chance  of  raiding  the  Mississippi  above 
Vicksburg.  The  expedition  succeeded  in  this  early  in 
January,  1863,  and  was  then  recalled  to  join  Grant. 
This  was  a  mortification  to  McClernand,  who  had  hoped 
for  a  command  independent  of  Grant.  In  his  subse 
quent  conduct  he  seems  to  have  shown  incapacity  ;  he 
was  certainly  insubordinate  to  Grant,  and  he  busied 
himself  in  intrigues  against  him,  with  such  result  as  will 
soon  be  seen.  As  soon  as  Grant  told  the  Administration 
that  he  was  dissatisfied  with  McClernand,  he  was 
assured  that  he  was  at  liberty  to  remove  him  from 
command.  This  he  eventually  did  after  some  months 
of  trial. 

In  the  first  three  months  of  1863,  while  the  army  of 
the  Potomac,  shattered  at  Fredericksburg,  was  being 
prepared  for  the  fresh  attack  upon  Lee  which  ended  at 
Chancellor sville,  and  while  Bragg  and  Rosecrans  lay 
confronting  each  other  in  Middle  Tennessee,  each 
content  that  the  other  was  afraid  to  weaken  himself  by 
sending  troops  to  the  Mississippi,  Grant  was  occupied  in 
a  series  of  enterprises  apparently  more  cautious  than 
that  in  which  he  eventually  succeeded,  but  each  in  its 


350  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

turn  futile.  An  attempt  was  made  to  render  Vicksburg 
useless  by  a  canal  cutting  across  the  bend  of  the  Missis 
sippi  to  the  west  of  that  fortress.  Then  Grant 
endeavoured  with  the  able  co-operation  of  Admiral 
Porter  and  his  flotilla  to  secure  a  safe  landing  on  the 
Yazoo,  which  enters  the  Mississippi  a  little  above. 
Vicksburg,  so  that  he  could  move  his  army  to  the  rear 
of  Vicksburg  by  this  route.  Next  Grant  and  Porter  tried 
to  establish  a  sure  line  of  water  communication  from  a 
point  far  up  the  Mississippi  through  an  old  canal,  then 
somehow  obstructed,  into  the  upper  waters  of  the  Yazoo 
and  so  to  a  point  on  that  river  30  or  40  miles  to  the  north 
east  of  Vicksburg,  by  which  they  would  have  turned  the 
right  of  the  main  Confederate  force  ;  but  this  was 
frustrated  by  the  Confederates,  who  succeeded  in 
establishing  a  strong  fort  further  up  the  Yazoo.  Yet  a 
further  effort  was  made  to  establish  a  waterway  by  a 
canal  quitting  the  Mississippi  about  40  miles  north  of 
Vicksburg  and  communicating  through  lakes,  bayous, 
and  smaller  rivers,  with  its  great  tributary  the  Red 
River  far  to  the  south.  This,  like  the  first  canal 
attempted,  would  have  rendered  Vicksburg  useless. 

Each  of  these  projects  failed  in  turn.  The  tedious 
engineering  work  which  two  of  them  involved  was 
rendered  more  depressing  by  adverse  conditions  of 
weather  and  by  ill-health  among  Grant's  men.  Natural 
grumbling  among  the  troops  was  repeated  and  exag 
gerated  in  the  North.  McClernarid  employed  the  gift 
for  intrigue,  which  perhaps  had  helped  him  to  secure  his 
command,  in  an  effort  to  get  Grant  removed.  It  is 
melancholy  to  add  that  a  good  many  newspapers  at  this 
time  began  to  print  statements  that  Grant  had  again 
taken  to  drink.  It  is  certain  that  he  was  at  this  time  a 
total  abstainer.  It  is  said  that  he  had  offended  the 
authors  of  this  villainy  by  the  restrictions  which  he  had 
long  before  found  necessary  to  put  upon  information  to 
the  Press.  Some  of  the  men  freely  confessed  afterwards 
that  they  had  been  convinced  of  his  sobriety,  and  added 
the  marvellous  apology  that  their  business  was  to  give 
the  public  "  the  news,"  Able  and  more  honest  journalists 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  351 

urged  that  Grant  had  proved  his  incompetence.  Secre 
tary  Chase  took  up  their  complaints  and  pressed  that 
Grant  should  be  removed.  Lincoln,  before  the  outcry 
against  Grant  had  risen  to  its  height,  had  felt  the  need 
of  closer  information  than  he  possessed  about  the 
situation  on  the  Mississippi  ;  and  had  hit  upon  the 
happy  expedient  of  sending  an  able  official  of  the  War 
Department,  who  deserved  and  obtained  the  confidence 
of  Grant  and  his  officers,  to  accompany  the  Western 
army  and  report  to  him.  Apart,  however,  from  the 
reports  he  thus  received,  he  had  always  treated  the 
attacks  on  Grant  with  contempt.  "  I  cannot  spare  this 
general ;  he  fights,"  he  said.  In  reply  to  complaints 
that  Grant  drank,  he  enquired  (adapting,  as  he  knew, 
George  II. 's  famous  saying  about  Wolfe)  what  whisky 
he  drank,  explaining  that  he  wished  to  send  barrels  of  it 
to  some  of  his  other  generals.  His  attitude  is  remarkable, 
because  in  his  own  mind  he  had  not  thought  well  of  any 
of  Grant's  plans  after  his  first  failure  in  December  ;  he 
had  himself  wished  from  an  early  day  that  Grant  would 
take  the  very  course  by  which  he  ultimately  succeeded. 
He  let  him  go  his  own  way,  as  he-  afterwards  told  him, 
from  "  a  general  hope  that  you  knew  better  than  I." 

At  the  end  of  March  Grant  took  a  memorable  deter 
mination  to  transfer  his  whole  force  to  the  south  of 
Vicksburg  and  approach  it  from  that  direction.  He  was 
urged  by  Sherman  to  give  up  any  further  attempt  to  use 
the  river,  and,  instead,  to  bring  his  whole  army  back  to 
Memphis  and  begin  a  necessarily  slow  approach  on 
Vicksburg  by  the  railway.  He  declared  himself  that  on 
ordinary  grounds  of  military  prudence  this  would  have 
been  the  proper  course,  but  he  decided  for  himself  that 
the  depressing  effect  of  the  retreat  to  Memphis  would  be 
politically  disastrous.  At  Grand  Gulf,  30  miles  south  of 
Vicksburg,  the  South  possessed  another  fortified  post  on 
the  river  ;  to  reach  this  Grant  required  the  help  of  the 
Navy,  not  only  in  crossing  from  the  western  bank  of  the 
river,  but  in  transporting  the  supplies  for  which  the  roads 
west  of  the  river  were  inadequate.  Admiral  Porter,  with 
his  gunboats  and  laden  barges,  successfully  ran  the 


352  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

gauntlet  of  the  Vicksburg  batteries  by  night  without 
serious  damage.  Grand  Gulf  was  taken  on  May  3,  and 
Grant's  army  established  at  this  new  base.  A  further 
doubt  now  arose.  General  Banks  in  Louisiana  was  at 
this  time  preparing  to  besiege  Port  Hudson.  It  might 
be  well  for  Grant  to  go  south  and  join  him,  and,  after 
reducing  Port  Hudson,  return  with  Banks's  forces  against 
Vicksburg.  This  was  what  now  commended  itself  to 
Lincoln.  In  the  letter  of  congratulation  which  some 
time  later  he  was  able  to  send  to  Grant,  after  referring 
to  his  former  opinion  which  had  been  right,  he  confessed 
that  he  had  now  been  wrong.  Banks  was  not  yet  ready 
to  move,  and  Vicksburg,  now  seriously  threatened,  might 
soon  be  reinforced.  Orders  to  join  Banks,  though  they 
were  probably  meant  to  be  discretionary,  were  actually 
sent  to  Grant,  but  too  late.  He  had  cut  himself  loose 
from  his  base  at  Grand  Gulf  and  marched  his  troops 
north,  to  live  with  great  hardship  to  themselves  on  the 
country  and  the  supplies  they  could  take  with  them. 
He  had  with  him  35,000  men.  General  Pemberton,  to 
whom  he  had  so  far  been  opposed,  lay  covering  Vicks 
burg  with  20,000  and  a  further  force  in  the  city  ;  Joseph 
Johnston,  whom  he  afterwards  described  as  the  Southern 
general  who  in  all  the  war  gave  him  most  trouble,  had 
been  sent  by  Jefferson  Davis  to  take  supreme  command 
in  the  West,  and  had  collected  11,000  men  at  Jackson, 
the  capital  of  Mississippi,  45  miles  east  of  Vicksburg. 
Grant  was  able  to  take  his  enemy  in  detail.  Having 
broken  up  Johnston's  force  he  defeated  Pemberton  in  a 
series  of  battles.  His  victory  at  Champion's  Hill  on 
May  1 6,  not  a  fortnight  after  Chancellorsville,  conveyed 
to  his  mind  the  assurance  that  the  North  would  win 
the  war.  An  assault  on  Vicksburg  failed  with  heavy 
loss.  Pemberton  was  at  last  closely  invested  in  Vicks 
burg  and  Grant  could  establish  safe  communications  with 
the  North  by  way  of  the  lower  Yazoo  and  up  the  Missis 
sippi  above  its  mouth.  There  had  been  dissension 
between  Pemberton  and  Johnston,  who,  seeing  that 
gunboats  proved  able  to  pass  Vicksburg  in  any  case, 
thought  that  Pemberton,  whom  he  could  not  at  the 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  353 

moment  hope  to  relieve,  should  abandon  Vicksburg  and 
try  to  save  his  army.  Long  before  Johnston  could  be 
sufficiently  reinforced  to  attack  Grant,  Grant's  force  had 
been  raised  to  71,000.  On  July  4,  1863,  the  day  of  the 
annual  commemoration  of  national  Independence,  Vicks 
burg  was  surrendered.  Its  garrison,  who  had  suffered 
severely,  were  well  victualled  by  Grant  and  allowed  to 
go  free  on  parole.  Pemberton  in  his  vexation  treated 
Grant  with  peculiar  insolence,  which  provoked  a  singular 
exhibition  of  the  conqueror's  good  temper  to  him ;  and 
in  his  despatches  to  the  President,  Grant  mentioned 
nothing  with  greater  pride  than  the  absence  of  a  word  or 
a  sign  on  the  part  of  his  men  which  could  hurt  the  feelings 
of  the  fallen.  Johnston  was  forced  to  abandon  the  town 
of  Jackson  with  its  large  stores  to  Sherman,  but  could 
not  be  pursued  in  his  retreat.  •  On  July  9,  five  days  later, 
the  defender  of  Port  Hudson,  invested  shortly  before  . 
by  Banks,  who  had  not  force  enough  for  an  assault,/ 
heard  the  news  of  Vicksburg  and  surrendered.  Lincoln 
could  now  boast  to  the  North  that  "  the  Father  of 
Waters  again* goes  unvexed  to  the  sea." 

At  the  very  hour  when  Vicksburg  was  surrendered 
Lincoln  had  been  issuing  the  news  of  another  victory  won 
in  the  preceding  three  days,  which,  along  with  the 
capture  of  Vicksburg,  marked  the  turning  point  of  the 
war.  For  more  than  a  month  after  the  battle  of 
Chancellorsville  the  two  opposing  armies  in  the  East  had 
lain  inactive.  The  Conscription  Law,  with  which  we 
must  deal  later,  had  recently  been  passed,  and  various 
elements  of  discontent  and  disloyalty  in  the  North 
showed  a  great  deal  of  activity.  It  seems  that  Jefferson 
Davis  at  first  saw  no  political  advantage  in  the  military 
risk  of  invading  the  North.  Lee  thought  otherwise,  and 
was  eager  to  follow  up  his  success.  At  last,  early  in 
June,  1863,  he  started  northward.  This  time  he  aimed 
at  the  great  industrial  regions  of  Pennsylvania,  hoping 
also  while  assailing  them  to  draw  Hooker  further  from 
Washington.  Hooker,  on  first  learning  that  Lee  had 
crossed  the  Rappahannock,  entertained  the  thought  of 
himself  going  south  of  it  and  attacking  Richmond. 


354  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

Lincoln  dissuaded  him,  since  he  might  be  "  entangled 
upon  the  river,  like  an  ox  jumped  half  over  a  fence  "  ;  he 
could  not  take  Richmond  for  weeks,  and  his  communica 
tions  might  be  cut ;  besides,  Lincoln  added,  his  true 
objective  point  throughout  was  Lee's  army  and  not 
Richmond.  Hooker's  later  movements,  in  conformity 
with  what  he  could  gather  of  Lee's  movements,  were 
prudent  and  skilful.  He  rejected  a  later  suggestion  of 
Lincoln's  that  he  should  strike  quickly  at  the  most 
assailable  point  in  Lee's  lengthening  line  of  communica 
tions,  and  he  was  wise,  for  Lee  could  live  on  the  country 
he  was  traversing,  and  Hooker  now  aimed  at  covering 
Philadelphia  or  Baltimore  and  Washington,  according  to 
the  direction  which  Lee  might  take,  watching  all  the 
while  for  the  moment  to  strike.  He  found  himself 
hampered  in  some  details  by  probably  injudicious 
orders  of  his  superior  Halleck,  and  became  irritable  and 
querulous  ;  Lincoln  had  to  exercise  his  simple  arts  to 
keep  him  to  his  duty  and  to  soothe  him,  and  was  for  the 
moment  successful.  Suddenly  on  June  27,  with  a  battle 
in  near  prospect,  Hooker  sent  in  his  resignation ; 
probably  he  meant  it,  but  there  was  no  time  to  debate 
the  matter.  Probably  he  had  lost  confidence  in  himself, 
as  he  did  before  at  Chancellorsville.  Lincoln  evidently 
judged  that  his  state  of  mind  made  it  wise  to  accept  this 
resignation.  He  promptly  appointed  in  Hooker's  place 
one  of  his  subordinates,  General  George  Meade,  a  lean, 
tall,  studious,  somewhat  sharp-tongued  man,  not 
brilliant  or  popular  or  the  choice  that  the  army  would 
have  expected,  but  with  a  record  in  previous  campaigns 
which  made  him  seem  to  Lincoln  trustworthy,  as  he  was. 
A  subordinate  command  in  which  he  could  really  dis 
tinguish  himself  was  later  found  for  Hooker,  who  now 
took  leave  of  his  army  in  words  of  marked  generosity 
towards  Meade.  All  this  while  there  was  great  excite 
ment  in  the  North.  Urgent  demands  had  been  raised 
for  the  recall  of  McClellan,  a  course  of  which,  Lincoln 
justly  observed,  no  one  could  measure  the  inconvenience 
so  well  as  he. 

Lee  was  now  feeling  his  way,  somewhat  in  the  dark, 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          355 

as  to  his  enemy's  movements,  because  he  had  despatched 
most  of  his  cavalry  upon  raiding  expeditions  towards  the 
important  industrial  centre  of  Harrisburg.  Meade  con 
tinued  on  a  parallel  course  to  him,  with  his  army  spread 
out  to  guard  against  any  movements  of  Lee's  to  the  east 
ward.  Each  commander  would  have  preferred  to  fight 
the  other  upon  the  defensive.  Suddenly  on  July  I, 
three  days  after  Meade  had  taken  command,  a  chance 
collision  took  place  north  of  the  town  of  Gettysburg 
between  the  advance  guards  of  the  two  armies.  It 
developed  into  a  general  engagement,  of  which  the  result 
must  partly  depend  on  the  speed  with  which  each 
commander  could  bring  up  the  remainder  of  his  army. 
On  the  first  day  Lee  achieved  a  decided  success.  The 
Northern  troops  were  driven  back  upon  steep  heights 
just  south  of  Gettysburg,  of  which  the  contour  made  it 
difficult  for  the  enemy  to  co-ordinate  his  movements  in 
any  attack  on  them.  Here  Meade,  who  when  the  battle 
began  was  ten  miles  away  and  did  not  expect  it,  was  able 
by  the  morning  of  the  2nd  or  during  that  day  to  bring  up 
his  full  force  ;  and  here,  contrary  to  his  original  choice 
of  a  position  for  bringing  on  a  battle,  he  made  his  stand. 
The  attack  planned  by  Lee  on  the  following  day  must,  in 
his  opinion,  afterwards  have  been  successful  if  "  Stone 
wall  "  Jackson  had  been  alive  and  with  him.  As  it  was, 
his  most  brilliant  remaining  subordinate,  Longstreet, 
disapproved  of  any  assault,  and  on  this  and  the  following 
day  obeyed  his  orders  reluctantly  and  too  slowly.  On 
July  3,  1863,  Lee  renewed  his  attack.  In  previous 
battles  the  Northern  troops  had  been  contending  with  in 
visible  enemies  in  woods  ;  now,  after  a  heavy  cannonade, 
the  whole  Southern  line  could  be  seen  advancing  in 
the  open  to  a  desperate  assault.  This  attack  was 
crushed  by  the  Northern  fire.  First  and  last  in  the 
fighting' round  Gettysburg  the  North  lost  23,000  out  of 
about  93,000  men,  and  the  South  about  an  equal  number 
out  of  78,000.  The  net  result  was  that,  after  a  day's 
delay,  Lee  felt  compelled  to  retreat.  Nothing  but  an 
actual  victory  would  have  made  it  wise  for  him  to  persist 
in  his  adventurous  invasion. 


356  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

The  importance  of  this,  which  has  been  remembered  as 
the  chief  battle  of  the  war,  must  be  estimated  rather  by 
the  peril  from  which  the  North  was  delivered  than  by  the 
results  it  immediately  reaped.  Neither  on  July  3  nor 
during  Lee's  subsequent  retreat  did  Meade  follow  up  his 
advantage  with  the  boldness  to  which  Lincoln,  in  the 
midst  of  his  congratulations,  exhorted  him.  On  July  12 
Lee  recrossed  the  Potomac.  Meade  on  the  day  before 
had  thought  of  attacking  him,  but  desisted  on  the  advice 
of  the  majority  in  a  council  of  war.  That  council  of  war, 
as  Lincoln  said,  should  never  have  been  held.  Its 
decision  was  demonstrably  wrong,  since  it  rested  on  the 
hope  that  Lee  would  himself  attack.  Lincoln  writhed 
at  a  phrase  in  Meade's  general  orders  about  "  driving  the 
invader  from  our  soil."  "  Will  our  generals,"  he 
exclaimed  in  private,  "  never  get  that  idea  out  of  their 
heads  ?  The  whole  country  is  our  soil."  Meade,  how 
ever,  unlike  McClellan,  was  only  cautious,  not  lukewarm, 
nor  without  a  mind  of  his  own.  The  army  opposed  to 
him  was  much  larger  than  that  which  McClellan  failed 
to  overwhelm  after  Antietam.  He  had  offered  to  resign 
when  he  inferred  Lincoln's  dissatisfaction  from  a 
telegram.  Lincoln  refused  this,  and  made  it  clear 
through  another  officer  that  his  strong  opinion  as  to 
what  might  have  been  done  did  not  imply  ingratitude  or 
want  of  confidence  towards  "  a  brave  and  skilful  officer, 
and  a  true  man."  Characteristically  he  relieved  his 
sense  of  Meade's  omissions  in  a  letter  of  most  lucid 
criticism,  and  characteristically  he  never  sent  it.  Step 
by  step  Meade  moved  on  Lee's  track  into  the  enemy's 
country.  Indecisive  manoeuvres  on  both  sides  con 
tinued  over  four  months.  Lee  was  forced  over  the 
Rappahannock,  then  over  the  Rapidan  ;  Meade  followed 
him,  found  his  army  in  peril,  and  prudently  and  promptly 
withdrew.  In  December  the  two  armies  went  into 
winter  quarters  on  the  two  sides  of  the  Rappahannock  to 
await  the  opening  of  a  very  different  campaign  when  the 
next  spring  was  far  advanced. 

The  autumn  months  of  1863  witnessed  in  the  middle 
West  a  varying  conflict  ending  in  a  Northern  victory 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          357 

hardly  less  memorable  than  those  of  Gettysburg  and 
Vicksburg.  At  last,  after  the  fall  of  Vicksburg,  Rose- 
crans  in  Middle  Tennessee  found  himself  ready  to 
advance.  By  skilful  manoeuvres,  in  the  difficult  country 
where  the  Tennessee  River  cuts  the  Cumberland  moun 
tains  and  the  parallel  ranges  which  run  from  north-east 
to  south-west  behind,  he  turned  the  flank  of  Bragg's 
position  at  Chattanooga  and  compelled  him  to  evacuate 
that  town  in  the  beginning  of  September.  Bragg,  as  he 
retreated,  succeeded  in  getting  false  reports  as  to  his 
movements  and  the  condition  of  his  army  conveyed  to 
Rosecrans,  who  accordingly  followed  him  up  in  an 
incautious  manner.  By  this  time  the  bulk  of  the  forces 
that  had  been  used  against  Vicksburg  should  have  been 
brought  to  support  Rosecrans.  Halleck,  however,  at 
first  scattered  them  for  purposes  which  he  thought  impor 
tant  in  the  West.  After  a  while,  however,  one  part  of  the 
army  at  Vicksburg  was  brought  back  to  General 
Burnside  in  Ohio,  from  whom  it  had  been  borrowed. 
Burnside  accomplished  the  very  advance  by  Lexington, 
in  Kentucky,  over  the  mountains  into  Eastern  Tennessee, 
which  Lincoln  had  so  long  desired  for  the  relief  of  the 
Unionists  there,  and  he  was  able  to  hold  his  ground, 
defeating  at  Knoxville  a  little  later  an  expedition  under 
Longs treet  which  was  sent  to  dislodge  him.  Other  por 
tions  of  the  Western  army  were  at  last  ordered  to  join 
Rosecrans,  but  did  not  reach  him  before  he  had  met  with 
disaster.  For  the  Confederate  authorities,  eager  to 
retrieve  their  losses,  sent  every  available  reinforcement 
to  Bragg,  and  he  was  shortly  able  to  turn  back  towards 
Chattanooga  with  over  71,000  men  against  the  57,000 
with  which  Rosecrans,  scattering  his  troops  in  false 
security,  was  pursuing  him.  The  two  armies  came  upon 
one  another,  without  clear  expectation,  upon  the 
Chickamauga  Creek  beyond  the  ridge  which  lies  south 
east  of  Chattanooga.  The  battle  fought  among  the 
woods  and  hills  by  Chickamauga  on  September  19  and  20 
surpassed  any  other  in  the  war  in  the  heaviness  of  the  loss 
on  each  side.  On  the  second  day  Bragg's  manoeuvres 
broke  Rosecrans'  line,  and  only  an  extraordinarily  gallant 


358  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

stand  by  Thomas  with  a  part  of  the  line,  in  successive 
positions  of  retreat,  prevented  Bragg  from  turning  the 
hasty  retirement  of  the  remainder  into  a  disastrous  rout. 
As  it  was  Rosecransmade  good  his  retreat  to  Chattanooga, 
but  there  he  was  in  danger  of  being  completely  cut  off. 
A  corps  was  promptly  detached  from  Meade  in  Virginia, 
placed  under  Hooker,  and  sent  to  relieve  him.  Rose- 
crans,  who  in  a  situation  of  real  difficulty  seems  to  have 
had  no  resourcefulness,  was  replaced  in  his  command  by 
Thomas.  Grant  was  appointed  to  supreme  command  of 
all  the  forces  in  the  West  and  ordered  to  Chattanooga. 
There,  after  many  intricate  operations  on  either  side,  a 
great  battle  was  eventually  fought  on  November  24 
and  25,  1863.  Grant  had  about  60,000  men  ;  Bragg, 
who  had  detached  Longstreet  for  his  vain  attack  on 
Burnside,  had  only  33,000,  but  he  had  one  steep  and 
entrenched  ridge  behind  another  on  which  to  stand. 
The  fight  was  marked  by  notable  incidents — Hooker's 
"  battle  above  the  clouds  " ;  and  the  impulse  by  which 
apparently  with  no  word  of  command,  Thomas's  corps, 
tired  of  waiting  while  Sherman  advanced  upon  the  one 
flank  and  Hooker  upon  the  other,  arose  and  carried  a 
ridge  which  the  enemy  and  Grant  himself  had  regarded 
as  impregnable.  It  ended  in  a  rout  of  the  Confederates, 
which  was  energetically  followed  up.  Bragg's  army  was 
broken  and  driven  right  back  into  Georgia.  To  sum  up 
the  events  of  the  year,  the  one  serious  invasion  of  the 
North  by  the  South  had  failed,  and  the  dominion  on 
which  the  Confederacy  had  any  real  hold  was  now 
restricted  to  the  Atlantic  States,  Alabama,  and  a  part 
of  the  State  of  Mississippi.  \s 

At  this  point,  at  which  the  issue  of  the  war,  if  it  were 
only  pursued,  could  not  be  doubtful,  and  at  which,  as  it 
happens,  the  need  of  Lincoln's  personal  intervention  in 
military  matters  became  greatly  diminished,  we  may 
try  to  obtain  a  general  impression  of  his  wisdom,  or  want 
of  it,  in  such  affairs.  The  closeness  and  keen  intelligence 
with  which  he  followed  the  war  is  undoubted,  but  could 
only  be  demonstrated  by  a  lengthy  accumulation  of 
evidence.  The  larger  strategy  of  the  North,  sound  in  the 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          359 

main,  was  of  course  the  product  of  more  than  one 
co-operating  mind,  but  as  his  was  undoubtedly  the 
dominant  will  of  his  Administration,  so  too  it  seems 
likely  that,  with  his  early  and  sustained  grasp  of  the 
general  problem,  he  contributed  not  a  little  to  the 
clearness  and  consistency  of  the  strategical  plans.  The 
amount  of  the  forces  raised  was  for  long,  as  we  shall  see 
later,  beyond  his  control,  and,  in  the  distribution  of  what 
he  had  to  the  best  effect,  his  own  want  of  knowledge  and 
the  poor  judgment  of  his  earlier  advisers  seems  to  have 
caused  some  errors.  He  started  with  the  evident  desire 
to  put  himself  almost  unreservedly  in  the  hands  of  the 
competent  military  counsellors,  and  he  was  able  in  the 
end  to  do  so  ;  but  for  a  long  intermediate  period,  as  we 
have  seen,  he  was  compelled  as  a  responsible  statesman 
to  forgo  this  wish.  It  was  all  that  time  his  function  first 
to  pick  out,  with  very  little  to  go  by,  the  best  officers  he 
could  find,  replacing  them  with  better  when  he  could ; 
and  secondly  to  give  them  just  so  much  direction,  and 
no  more,  as  his  wisdom  at  a  distance  and  their  more 
expert  skill  upon  the  spot  made  proper.  In  each  of  these 
respects  his  occasional  mistakes  are  plain  enough,  but 
the  evidence,  upon  which  he  has  often  been  thought 
capable  of  setting  aside  sound  military  considerations 
causelessly  or  in  obedience  to  interested  pressure, 
breaks  down  when  the  facts  of  any  imputed  instance  are 
known.  It  is  manifest  that  he  gained  rapidly  both  in 
knowledge  of  the  men  he  dealt  with  and  in  the  firm 
kindness  with  which  he  treated  them.  It  is  remarkable 
that,  with  his  ever-burning  desire  to  see  vigour  and  ability 
displayed,  he  could  watch  so  constantly  as  he  did  for  the 
precise  opportunity  or  the  urgent  necessity  before  he 
made  changes  in  command.  It  is  equally  remarkable 
that,  with  his  decided  and  often  right  views  as  to  what 
should  be  done,  his  advice  was  always  offered  with  equal 
deference  and  plainness.  "  Quite  possibly  I  was  wrong 
both  then  and  now,"  he  once  wrote  to  Hooker  ;  "  but 
in  the  great  responsibility  resting  upon  me,  I  cannot  be 
entirely  silent.  Now,  all  I  ask  is  that  you  will  be  in  such 
mood  that  we  can  get  into  action  the  best  cordial 


36o  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

judgment  of  yourself  and  General  Halleck,  with  my  poor 
mite  added,  if  indeed  he  and  you  shall  think  it  entitled 
to  any  consideration  at  all."  The  man  whose  habitual 
attitude  was  this,  and  who  yet  could  upon  the  instant 
take  his  own  decision,  may  be  presumed  to  have  been 
wise  in  many  cases  where  we  do  not  know  his  reasons. 
•' ./Few  statesmen,  perhaps,  have  so  often  stood  waiting  and 
refrained  themselves  from  a  firm  will  and  not  from  the 
want  of  it,  and  for  the  sake  of  the  rare  moment  of  action. 
"The  passing  of  the  crisis  in  the  war  was  fittingly 
commemorated  by  a  number  of  State  Governors  who 
combined  to  institute  a  National  Cemetery  upon  the 
field  of  Gettysburg.  It  was  dedicated  on  November  19, 
1863.  The  speech  of  the  occasion  was  delivered  by 
Edward  Everett,  the  accomplished  man  once  already 
mentioned  as  the  orator  of  highest  repute  in  his  day. 
The  President  was  bidden  then  to  say  a  few  words  at 
the  close.  The  oration  with  which  for  two  hours  Everett 
delighted  his  vast  audience  must  now  seem  florid,  and  it 
was  poverty  of  feeling  that  made  him  in  that  place,  where 
so  many  Americans  of  the  South  had  fallen,  expatiate 
on  the  sinfulness  of  rebellion.  The  few  words  of  Abra 
ham  Lincoln  were  such  as  perhaps  sank  deep,  but  left  his 
audience  unaware  that  a  classic  had  been  spoken  which 
would  endure  with  the  English  language.  The  most 
literary  man  present  was  also  Lincoln's  greatest  admirer, 
young  John  Hay.  To  him  it  seemed  that  Mr.  Everett 
spoke  perfectly,  and  "  the  old  man  "  gracefully  for  him. 
These  were  the  few  words  :  "  Four  score  and  seven  years 
ago  our  fathers  brought  forth  on  this  continent  a  new 
nation,  conceived  in  liberty  and  dedicated  to  the 
proposition  that  all  men  are  created  equal.  Now  we  are 
engaged  in  a  great  civil  war,  testing  whether  that  nation, 
or  any  nation  so  conceived  and  so  dedicated,  can  long 
endure.  We  are  met  on  a  great  battlefield  of  that  war. 
We  have  come  to  dedicate  a  portion  of  that  field  as  a 
final  resting  place  for  those  who  here  gave  their  lives  that 
that  nation  might  live.  It  is  altogether  fitting  and  proper 
that  we  should  do  this.  But,  in  a  larger  sense,  we  cannot 
dedicate — we  cannot  consecrate — we  cannot  hallow — 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          361 

this  ground.  The  brave  men,  living  and  dead,  who 
struggled  here  have  consecrated  it  far  above  our  poor 
power  to  add  or  to  detract.  The  world  will  little  note 
nor  long  remember  what  we  say  here,  but  it  can  never 
forget  what  they  did  here.  It  is  for  us,  the  living,  rather 
to  be  dedicated  here  to  the  unfinished  work  which  they 
who  fought  here  have  thus  far  so  nobly  advanced.  It  is 
rather  for  us  to  be  here  dedicated  to  the  great  task 
remaining  before  us — that  from  these  honoured  dead 
we  take  increased  devotion  to  that  cause  for  which  they 
gave  the  last  full  measure  of  devotion  ;  that  we  here 
highly  resolve  that  these  dead  shall  not  have  died  in 
vain  ;  that  this  nation,  under  God,  shall  have  a  new 
birth  of  freedom  ;  and  that  government  of  the  people, 
by  the  people,  for  the  people,  shall  not  perish  from  the 
earth." 

2.  Conscription  and  the  Politics  of  1863. 

The  events  of  our  day  may  tempt  us  to  underestimate 
the  magnitude  of  the  American  Civil  War,  not  only  in 
respect  of  its  issues,  but  in  respect  of  the  efforts  that  were 
put  forth.  Impartial  historians  declare  that  "  no 
previous  war  had  ever  in  the  same  time  entailed  upon  the 
combatants  such  enormous  sacrifices  of  life  and  wealth." 
Even  such  battles  as  Malplaquet  had  not  rivalled  in 
carnage  the  battles  of  this  war,  and  in  the  space  of  these 
four  years  there  took  place  a  number  of  engagements — far 
more  than  can  be  recounted  here — in  many  of  which,  as 
at  Gettysburg,  the  casualties  amounted  to  a  quarter  of 
the  whole  forces  engaged.  The  Southern  armies, 
especially  towards  the  end  of  the  war,  were  continually 
being  pitted  against  vastly  superior  numbers ;  the 
Northern  armies,  whether  we  look  at  the  whole  war  as 
one  vast  enterprise  of  conquest  or  at  almost  any  impor 
tant  battle  save  that  of  Gettysburg,  were  as  continually 
confronted  with  great  obstacles  in  the  matter  of  locality 
and  position.  In  this  case,  of  a  new  and  not  much 
organised  country  unprepared  for  war,  exact  or  intelligible 
figures  as  to  losses  or  as  to  the  forces  raised  must  not  be 
expected,  but,  according  to  what  seems  to  be  a  fair 


362  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

estimate,  the  total  deaths  on  the  Northern  and  the 
Southern  side  directly  due  to  the  war  stood  to  the  popu 
lation  of  the  whole  country  at  its  beginning  as  at  least 
I  to  32.  Of  these  deaths  about  half  occurred  on  the 
Northern  and  half  on  the  Southern  side ;  this,  however, 
implies  that  in  proportion  to  its  population  the  South 
lost  twice  as  heavily  as  the  North. 

Neither  side  obtained  the  levies  of  men  that  it  needed 
without  resort  to  compulsion.  The  South,  in  which  this 
necessity  either  arose  more  quickly  or  was  seen  more 
readily,  had  called  up  before  the  end  of  the  war  its  whole 
available  manhood.  In  the  North  the  proportion  of 
effort  and  sacrifice  required  was  obviously  less,  and,  at 
least  at  one  critical  moment,  it  was  disastrously  under 
estimated.  A  system  of  compulsion,  to  be  used  in 
default  -of  volunteering,  was  brought  into  effect  half-way 
through  the  war.  Under  this  system  there  were  in  arms 
at  the  end  of  the  war  980,000  white  Northern  soldiers, 
who  probably  stood  to  the  population  at  that  time  in  as 
high  a  proportion  as  I  to  25,  and  everything  was  in 
readiness  for  calling  up  a  vastly  greater  number  if 
necessary.  After  twenty  months  of  war,  when  the  purely 
voluntary  system  still  existed  but  was  proving  itself 
inadequate  to  make  good  the  wastage  of  the  armies,  the 
number  in  arms  for  the  North  was  860,717,  perhaps  as 
much  as  I  in  27  of  the  population  then.  It  would  be 
useless  to  evade  the  question  which  at  once  suggests 
itself,  whether  the  results  of  voluntary  enlistment  in  this 
country  during  the  present  war  have  surpassed  to  the 
extent  to  which  they  undoubtedly  ought  to  have  sur 
passed  the  standard  set  by  the  North  in  the  Civil  War. 
For  these  two  cases  furnish  the  only  instances  in  which 
the  institution  of  voluntary  enlistment  has  been  sub 
mitted  to  a  severe  test  by  Governments  reluctant  to 
abandon  it.  The  two  cases  .are  of  course  not  strictly 
comparable.  Our  own  country  in  this  matter  had  the 
advantages  of  riper  organisation,  political  and  social,  and 
of  the  preparatory  education  given  it  by  the  Territorials 
and  by  Lord  Roberts.  The  extremity  of  the  need  was 
in  our  case  immediately  apparent ;  and  the  cause  at 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          363 

issue  appealed  with  the  utmost  simplicity  and  intensity 
to  every  brave  and  to  every  gentle  nature.  In  the 
Northern  States,  on  the  other  hand,  apart  from  all  other 
considerations,  there  were  certain  to  be  sections,  local, 
racial,  and  political,  upon  which  the  national  cause  could 
take  no  very  firm  hold.  That  this  was  so  proves  no 
unusual  prevalence  of  selfishness  or  of  stupidity  ;  and 
the  apathy  of  such  sections  of  the  people,  like  that  of 
smaller  sections  in  our  own  case,  sets  in  a  brighter  light 
the  devotion  which  made  so  many  eager  to  give  their  all. 
Moreover,  the  general  patriotism  of  the  Northern  people  is 
not  to  be  judged  by  the  failure  of  the  purely  voluntary 
system,  but  rather,  as  will  be  seen  later,  by  the  success 
of  the  system  which  succeeded  it.  There  is  in  our  case 
no  official  statement  of  the  exact  number  serving  on 
any  particular  day,  but  the  facts  which  are  published 
make  it  safe  to  conclude  that,  at  the  end  of  fifteen 
months  of  war,  when  no  compulsion  was  in  force,  the 
soldiers  then  in  service  and  drawn  from  the  United 
Kingdom  alone  amounted  to  I  in  17  of  the  population. 
The  population  in  this  case  is  one  of  which  a  smaller 
proportion  are  of  military  age  than  was  the  case  in  the 
Northern  States,  with  their  great  number  of  immigrants. 
The  apparent  effect  of  these  figures  would  be  a  good 
deal  heightened  if  it  were  possible  to  make  a  correct 
addition  in  the  case  of  each  country  for  the  numbers 
killed  or  disabled  in  war  up  to  the  dates  in  question 
and  for  the  numbers  serving  afloat.  Moreover,  the 
North,  when  it  was  driven  to  abandon  the  purely 
voluntary  system,  had  not  reached  the  point  at  which 
the  withdrawal  of  men  from  civil  occupations  could 
have  been  regarded  among  the  people  as  itself  a  national 
danger,  or  at  which  the  Government  was  compelled  to 
deter  some  classes  from  enlisting  ;  new  industries  uncon 
nected  with  the  war  were  all  the  while  springing  up,  and 
the  production  and  export  of  foodstuffs  were  increasing 
rapidly.  For  the  reasons  which  have  been  stated,  there 
is  nothing  invidious  in  thus  answering  an  unavoidable 
question.  Judged  by  any  previous  standard  of  voluntary 
national  effort,  the  North  answered  the  test  well.  Each 


364  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

of  our  related  peoples  must  look  upon  the  rally  of  its 
fathers  and  grandfathers  in  the  one  case,  its  brothers  and 
sons  in  the  other,  with  mingled  feelings  in  which  pride 
predominates,  the  most  legitimate  source  of  pride  in  our 
case  being  the  unity  of  the  Empire.  To  each  the  question 
must  present  itself  whether  the  nations,  democratic  and 
otherwise,  which  have  followed  from  the  first  or,  like  the 
South,  have  rapidly  adopted  a  different  principle  have 
not,  in  this  respect,  a  juster  cause  of  pride.  In  some  of 
these  countries,  by  common  and  almost  unquestioning 
consent,  generation  after  generation  of  youths  and  men 
in  their  prime  have  held  themselves  at  the  instant  dis 
posal  of  their  country  if  need  should  arise  ;  and,  in  the 
absence  of  need  and  the  absence  of  excitement,  have 
contentedly  borne  the  appreciable  sacrifice  of  training. 
With  this  it  is  surely  necessary  to  join  a  further  question, 
whether  the  compulsion  which,  under  conscription,  the 
public  imposes  on  individuals  is  comparable  in  its  harsh 
ness  to  the  sacrifice  and  the  conflict  of  duties  imposed 
by  the  voluntary  system  upon  the  best  people  in  all 
classes  as  such. 

From  the  manner  in  which  the  war  arose  it  will  easily 
be  understood  that  the  South  was  quicker  than  the  North 
in  shaping  its  policy  for  raising  armies.  Before  a  shot 
had  been  fired  at  Fort  Sumter,  and  when  only  seven  of 
the  ten  Southern  States  had  yet  seceded,  President 
Jefferson  Davis  had  at  his  command  more  than  double 
the  number  of  the  United  States  Army  as  it  then  was. 
He  had  already  lawful  authority  to  raise  that  number  to 
nearly  three  times  as  many.  And,  though  there  was 
protest  in  some  States,  and  some  friction  between  the 
Confederate  War  Department  and  the  State  militias,  on 
the  whole  the  seceding  States,  in  theory  jealous  of  their 
rights,  submitted  very  readily  in  questions  of  defence  to 
the  Confederacy. 

It  is  not  clear  how  far  the  Southern  people  displayed 
their  warlike  temper  by  a  sustained  flow  of  voluntary 
enlistment  ;  but  their  Congress  showed  the  utmost 
promptitude  in  granting  every  necessary  power  to  their 
President,  and  on  April  16,  1862,  a  sweeping  measure 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          365 

of  compulsory  service  was  passed.  The  President  of  the 
Confederacy  could  call  into  the  service  any  white  resident 
in  the  South  between  the  ages  of  eighteen  and  thirty-five, 
with  certain  statutory  exemptions.  There  was,  of  course, 
trouble  about  the  difficult  question  of  exemptions,  and 
under  conflicting  pressure  the  Confederate  Congress 
made  and  unmade  various  laws  about  them.  After  a 
time  all  statutory  exemptions  were  done  away,  and  it 
was  left  entirely  in  the  discretion  of  the  Southern  Presi 
dent  to  say  what  men  were  required  in  various  depart 
ments  of  civil  life.  The  liability  to  serve  was  extended 
in  September,  1862,  to  all  between  eighteen  and  forty- 
five,  and  finally  in  February,  1864,  to  all  between 
seventeen  and  fifty.  The  rigorous  conscription  which 
necessity  required  could  not  be  worked  without  much 
complaint.  There  was  a  party  disposed  to  regard  the 
law  as  unconstitutional.  The  existence  of  sovereign 
States  within  the  Confederacy  was  very  likely  an 
obstacle  to  the  local  and  largely  voluntary  organisation 
for  deciding  claims  which  can  exist  in  a  unified  country. 
A  Government  so  hard  driven  must,  even  if  liberally 
minded,  have  enforced  the  law  with  much  actual  hard 
ship.  A  belief  in  the  ruthlessness  of  the  Southern 
conscription  penetrated  to  the  North.  It  was  probably 
exaggerated  from  the  temptation  to  suppose  that 
secession  was  the  work  of  a  tyranny  and  not  of  the 
Southern  people.  Desertion  and  failure  of  the  Con 
scription  Law  became  common  in  the  course  of  1864,  but 
this  would  seem  to  have  been  due  not  so  much  to  resent 
ment  at  the  system  as  to  the  actual  loss  of  a  large  part 
of  the  South,  and  the  spread  of  a  perception  that  the 
war  was  now  hopelessly  lost.  In  the  last  extremities 
of  the  Confederate  Government  the  power  of  compulsion 
of  course  completely  broke  down.  But,  upon  the  surface 
at  least,  it  seems  plain  that  what  has  been  called  the 
military  despotism  of  Jefferson  Davis  rested  upon  the 
determination  rather  than  upon  the  submissiveness  of 
the  people. 

In  the  North,  where  there  was  double  the  population 
to  draw  upon,  the  need  for  compulsion  was  not  likely  to 


366  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

be  felt  as  soon.  The  various  influences  which  would 
later  depress  enlistment  had  hardly  begun  to  assert 
themselves,  when  the  Government,  as  if  to  aggravate 
them  in  advance,  committed  a  blunder  which  has  never 
been  surpassed  in  its  own  line.  On  April  3,  1862, 
recruiting  was  stopped  dead ;  the  central  recruiting 
office  at  Washington  was  closed  and  its  staff  dispersed. 
Many  writers  agree  in  charging  this  error  against  Stanton. 
He  must  have  been  the  prime  author  of  it,  but  this  does 
not  exonerate  Lincoln.  It  was  no  departmental  matter, 
but  a  matter  of  supreme  policy.  Lincoln's  knowledge  of 
human  nature  and  his  appreciation  of  the  larger  bearings 
of  every  question  might  have  been  expected  to  set 
Stanton  right,  unless,  indeed,  the  thing  was  done 
suddenly  behind  his  back.  In  any  case,  this  must  be 
added  to  the  indications  seen  in  an  earlier  chapter,  that 
Lincoln's  calm  strength  and  sure  judgment  had  at  that 
time  not  yet  reached  their  full  development.  As  for 
Stanton,  a  man  of  much  narrower  mind,  but  acute, 
devoted,  and  morally  fearless,  kept  in  the  War  Depart 
ment  as  a  sort  of  tame  tiger  to  prey  on  abuses,  negligences, 
pretensions,  and  political  influences,  this  was  one  among 
a  hundred  smaller  erratic  doings,  which  his  critics  have 
never  thought  of  as  outweighing  his  peculiar  usefulness. 
His  departmental  point  of  view  can  easily  be  understood. 
Recruits,  embarrassingly,  presented  themselves  much 
faster  than  they  could  be  organised  or  equipped,  and  an 
overdriven  office  did  not  pause  to  think  out  some  scheme 
of  enlistment  for  deferred  service.  Waste  had  been 
terrific,  and  Stanton  did  not  dislike  a  petty  economy 
which  might  shock  people  in  Washington.  McClellan 
clamoured  for  more  men — let  him  do  something-  with 
what  he  had  got ;  Stanton,  indeed,  very  readily  became 
sanguine  that  McClellan,  once  in  motion,  would  crush 
the  Confederacy.  Events  conspired  to  make  the  mistake 
disastrous.  In  these  very  days  the  Confederacy  was 
about  to  pass  its  own  Conscription  Act.  McClellan, 
instead  of  pressing  on  to  Richmond,  sat  down  before 
Yorktown  and  let  the  Confederate  conscripts  come  up. 
Halleck  was  crawling  southward,  when  a  rapid  advance 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          367 

might  have  robbed  the  South  of  a  large  recruiting  area. 
The  reopening  of  enlistment  came  on  the  top  of  the  huge 
disappointment  at  McClellan's  failure  in  the  peninsula. 
There  was  a  creditable  response  to  the  call  which  was 
then  made  for  volunteers.  But  the  disappointments  of  the 
war  continued  throughout  1862  ;  the  second  Bull  Run  ; 
the  inconclusive  sequel  to  Antietam  ;  Fredericksburg  ; 
and,  side  by  side  with  these  events,  the  long-drawn  failure 
of  Buell's  and  Rosecrans'  operations.  The  spirit  of  volun 
tary  service  seems  to  have  revived  vigorously  enough 
wherever  and  whenever  the  danger  of  Southern  invasion 
became  pressing,  but  under  this  protracted  depressing 
influence  it  no  longer  rose  to  the  task  of  subduing  the 
South.  It  must  be  added  that  wages  in  civil  employ 
ment  were  very  high.  Lincoln,  it  is  evident,  felt  this 
apparent  failure  of  patriotism  sadly,  but  in  calm  retro 
spect  it  cannot  seem  surprising. 

In  the  latter  part  of  1862  attempts  were  made  to  use 
the  powers  of  compulsion  which  the  several  States 
possessed,  under  the  antiquated  laws  as  to  militia 
which  existed  in  all  of  them,  in  order  to  supplement 
recruiting.  The  number  of  men  raised  for  short  periods 
in  this  way  is  so  small  that  the  description  of  the  Northern 
armies  at  this  time  as  purely  volunteer  armies  hardly 
needs  qualification.  It  would  probably  be  worth  no 
one's  while  to  investigate  the  makeshift  system  with  which 
the  Government,  very  properly,  then  tried  to  help  itself 
out;  for  it  speedily J  and  completely  failed.  The  Con 
scription  Act,  which  became  law  on  March  3,  1863,  set 
up  for  the  first  time  an  organisation  for  recruiting  which 
covered  the  whole  country  but  was  under  the  complete 
control  of  the  Federal  Government.  It  was  placed  under 
an  officer  of  great  ability,  General  J.  B.  Fry,  formerly 
chief  of  the  staff  to  Buell,  and  now  entitled  Provost- 
Marshal-General.  It  was  his  business,  through  provost- 
marshals  in  a  number  of  districts,  each  divisible  into 
sub-districts  as  convenience  might  require,  to  enroll  all 
male  citizens  between  twenty  and  forty-five.  He  was 
to  assign  a  quota,  in  other  words  a  stated  proportion  of 
the  number  of  troops  for  which  the  Government  might 


368  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

at  any  time  call,  to  each  district,  having  regard  to  the 
number  of  previous  enlistments  from  each  district. 
The  management  of  voluntary  enlistment  was  placed  in 
his  hands,  in  order  that  the  two  methods  of  recruiting 
might  be  worked  in  harmony.  The  system  as  a  whole 
was  quite  distinct  from  any  such  system  of  universal 
service  as  might  have  been  set  up  beforehand  in  time  of 
peace.  Compulsion  only  came  into  force  in  default  of 
sufficient  volunteers  from  any  district  to  provide  its 
required  number  of  the  troops  wanted.  When  it  came 
into  force  the  "  drafts  "  of  conscripts  were  chosen  by  lot 
from  among  those  enrolled  as  liable  for  service.  But 
there  was  a  way  of  escape  from  actual  service.  It  seems, 
from  what  Lincoln  wrote,  to  have  been  looked  upon  as  a 
time-honoured  principle,  established  by  precedent  in  all 
countries,  that  the  man  on  whom  the  lot  fell  might  pro 
vide  a  substitute  if  he  could.  The  market  price  of  a 
substitute  (a  commodity  for  the  provision  of  which  a 
class  of  "  substitute  brokers  "  came  into  being)  proved 
to  be  about  1,000  dollars.  Business  or  professional  men, 
who  felt  they  could  not  be  spared  from  home  but  wished 
to  act  patriotically,  did  buy  substitutes  ;  but  they  need 
not  have  done  so,  for  the  law  contained  a  provision 
intended,  as  Lincoln  recorded,  to  safeguard  poorer  men 
against  such  a  rise  in  prices.  They  could  escape  by  pay 
ing  300  dollars,  or  .£60,  not,  in  the  then  state  of  wages,  an 
extravagant  penalty  upon  an  able-bodied  man.  The 
sums  paid  under  this  provision  covered  the  cost  of  the 
recruiting  business. 

Most  emphatically  the  Conscription  Law  operated 
mainly  as  a  stimulus  to  voluntary  enlistment.  The 
volunteer  received,  as  the  conscript  did  not,  a  bounty 
from  the  Government ;  States,  counties,  and  smaller 
localities,  when  once  a  quota  was  assigned  to  them,  vied 
with  one  another  in  filling  their  quota  with  volunteers, 
and  for  that  purpose  added  to  the  Government  bounty. 
It  goes  without  saying  that  in  a  new  country,  with  its 
scattered  country  population  and  its  disorganised  great 
new  towns,  there  were  plenty  of  abuses.  Substitute 
brokers  provided  the  wrong  article  ;  ingenious  rascals 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          369 

invented  the  trade  of  "  bounty-jumping,"  and  would 
enlist  for  a  bounty,  desert,  enlist  for  another  bounty, 
and  so  on  indefinitely  ;  and  the  number  of  men  enrolled 
who  were  afterwards  unaccounted  for  was  large.  There 
was  of  course  also  grumbling  of  localities  at  the  quotas 
assigned  to  them,  though  no  pains  were  spared  to  assign 
them  fairly.  There  was  some  opposition  to  the  working, 
of  the  law  after  it  was  passed,  but  it  was,  not  general,  but 
partly  the  opposition  of  rowdies  in  degraded  neighbour 
hoods,  partly  a  factitious  political  opposition,  and  partly 
seditious  and  openly  friendly  to  the  South.  In  general 
the  country  accepted  the  law  as  a  manifest  military 
necessity.  The  spirit  and  manner  of  its  acceptance  may 
be  judged  from  the  results  of  any  of  the  calls  for  troops 
under  this  law.  For  example,  in  December,  1864, 
towards  the  end  of  the  war,  21 1,752  men  were  brought  up 
to  the  colours  ;  of  these  it  seems  that  194,715  were 
ordinary  volunteers,  10,192  were  substitutes  provided 
by  conscripts,  and  only  6,845  were  actually  compelled 
men.  It  is  perhaps  more  significant  still  that  among 
those  who  did  not  serve  there  were  only  460  who  paid 
the  3OO-dollar  penalty,  as  against  the  10,192  who  must 
have  paid  at  least  three  times  that  sum  for  substitutes. 
Behind  the  men  who  had  been  called  up  by  the  end  of  the 
war  the  North  had,  enrolled  and  ready  to  be  called,  over 
two  million  men.  The  North  had  not  to  suffer  as  the 
South  suffered,  but  unquestionably  in  this  matter  it  rose 
to  the  occasion. 

The  constitutional  validity  of  the  law  was  much  ques 
tioned  by  politicians,  but  never  finally  tried  out  on  appeal 
to  the  Supreme  Court.  There  seems  to  be  no  room  for 
doubt  that  Lincoln's  own  reasoning  on  this  matter  was 
sound.  The  Constitution  simply  gave  to  Congress 
"  power  to  raise  and  support  armies,"  without  a  word  as 
to  the  particular  means  to  be  used  for  the  purpose  ;  the 
new  and  extremely  well-considered  Constitution  of  the 
Confederacy  was  in  this  respect  the  same.  The  Constitu 
tion,  argued  Lincoln,  would  not  have  given  the  power  of 
raising  armies  without  one  word  as  to  the  mode  in  which 
it  was  to  be  exercised,  if  it  had  not  meant  Congress  to  be 


370  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  sole  judge  as  to  the  mode.  "  The  principle,"  he 
wrote,  "  of  the  draft,  which  simply  is  involuntary  or 
enforced  service,  is  not  new.  It  has  been  practised  in 
all  ages  of  the  world.  It  was  well  known  to  the  framers 
of  our  Constitution  as  one  of  the  modes  of  raising  armies. 
...  It  had  been  used  just  before,  in  establishing  our 
independence,  and  it  was  also  used  under  the  Constitu 
tion  in  1812."  In  fact,  as  we  have  seen,  a  certain  power 
of  compelling  military  service  existed  in  each  of  the 
States  and  had  existed  in  them  from  the  first.  Their 
ancestors  had  brought  the  principle  with  them  from  the 
old  country,  in  which  the  system  of  the  "  militia  ballot  " 
had  not  fallen  into  desuetude  when  they  became  inde 
pendent.  The  traditional  English  jealousy,  which  the 
American  Colonies  had  imbibed,  against  the  military 
power  of  the  Crown  had  never  manifested  itself  in  any 
objection  to  the  means  which  might  be  taken  to  raise 
soldiers,  but  in  establishing  a  strict  control  of  the  number 
which  the  Crown  could  at  any  moment  maintain  ;  and 
this  control  had  long  been  in  England  and  had  always 
been  in  America  completely  effective.  We  may  there 
fore  treat  the  protest  which  was  raised  against  the  law  as 
unconstitutional,  and  the  companion  argument  that  it 
tended  towards  military  despotism,  as  having  belonged 
to  the  realm  of  political  verbiage,  and  as  neither  founded 
in  reason  nor  addressed  to  living  popular  emotions, 

This  is  the  way  in  which  the  Northern  people,  of  whom 
a  large  part  were,  it  must  be  remembered,  Democrats, 
seem  to  have  regarded  these  contentions,  and  a  real 
sense,  apart  from  these  contentions,  that  conscription 
was  unnecessary  or  produced  avoidable  hardship  seems 
scarcely  to  have  existed.  It  was  probably  for  this  reason 
that  Lincoln  never  published  the  address  to  the  people, 
or  perhaps  more  particularly  to  the  Democratic  opposi 
tion,  to  which  several  references  have  already  been  made. 
In  the  course  of  it  he  said  :  "  At  the  beginning  of  the  war, 
and  ever  since,  a  variety  of  motives,  pressing,  some  in 
one  direction  and  some  in  the  other,  would  be  presented 
to  the  mind  of  each  man  physically  fit  to  be  a  soldier, 
upon  the  combined  effect  of  which  motives  he  would, 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          371 

or  would  not,  voluntarily  enter  the  service.  Among 
these  motives  would  be  patriotism,  political  bias, 
ambition,  personal  courage,  love  of  adventure,  want  of 
employment,  and  convenience,  or  the  opposite  of  some 
of  these.  We  already  have  and  have  had  in  the  service, 
as  it  appears,  substantially  all  that  can  be  obtained  upon 
this  voluntary  weighing  of  motives.  And  yet  we  must 
somehow  obtain  more  or  relinquish  the  original  object 
of  the  contest,  together  with  all  the  blood  and  treasure 
already  expended  in  the  effort  to  secure  it.  To  meet 
this  necessity  the  law  for  the  draft  has  been  enacted. 
You  who  do  not  wish  to  be  soldiers  do  not  like  this  law? 
This  is  natural ;  nor  does  it  imply  want  of  patriotism. 
Nothing  can  be  so  just  and  necessary  as  to  make  us  like 
it  if  it  is  disagreeable  to  us.  We  are  prone,  too,  to 
find  false  arguments  with  which  to  excuse  ourselves  for 
opposing  such  disagreeable  things."  He  proceeded  to 
meet  some  of  these  arguments  upon  the  lines  which  have 
already  been  indicated.  After  speaking  of  the  precedents 
for  conscription  in  America,  he  continued  :  "  Wherein 
is  the  peculiar  hardship  now  ?  Shall  we  shrink  from  the 
necessary  means  to  maintain  our  free  government,  which 
our  grandfathers  employed  to  establish  it  and  our 
fathers  have  already  once  employed  to  maintain  it  ? 
Are  we  degenerate  r  Has  the  manhood  of  our  race  run 
out  ?  "  Unfair  administration  was  apprehended.  "  This 
law,"  he  said,  "  belongs  to  a  class,  which  class  is  composed 
of  those  laws  whose  object  is  to  distribute  burthens  or 
benefits  on  the  principle  of  equality.  No  one  of  these  laws 
can  ever  be  practically  administered  with  that  exactness 
which  can  be  conceived  of  in  the  mind.  A  tax  law  .  .  . 
will  be  a  dead  letter,  if  no  one  will  be  compelled  to  pay 
until  it  can  be  shown  that  every  other  one  will  be  com 
pelled  to  pay  in  precisely  the  same  proportion  according 
to  value  ;  nay  even  it  will  be  a  dead  letter  if  no  one  can 
be  compelled  to  pay  until  it  is  certain  that  every  other 
one  will  pay  at  all.  .  .  .  This  sort  of  difficulty  applies 
in  full  force  to  the  practical  administration  of  the  draft 
law.  In  fact,  the  difficulty  is  greater  in  the  case  of  the 
draft  law  "  ;  and  he  proceeded  to  state  the  difficulties. 


372  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

"  In  all  these  points,"  he  continued,  "  errors  will  occur 
in  spite  of  the  utmost  fidelity.  The  Government  is 
bound  to  administer  the  law  with  such  an  approach  to 
exactness  as  is  usual  in  analogous  cases,  and  as  entire 
good  faith  and  fidelity  will  reach."  Errors,  capable  of 
correction,  should,  he  promised,  be  corrected  when 
pointed  out ;  but  he  concluded  :  "  With  these  views 
and  on  these  principles,  I  feel  bound  to  tell  you  it  is  my 
purpose  to  see  the  draft  law  faithfully  executed."  It 
was  his  way,  as  has  been  seen,  sometimes  to  set  his 
thoughts  very  plainly  on  paper  and  to  consider  after 
wards  the  wisdom  of  publishing  them.  This  paper  never 
saw  the  light  till  after  his  death.  It  is  said  that  some 
scruple  as  to  the  custom  in  his  office  restrained  him  from 
sending  it  out,  but  this  scruple  probably  weighed  with 
him  the  more  because  he  saw  that  the  sincere  people 
whom  he  had  thought  of  addressing  needed  no  such 
appeal.  It  was  surely  a  wise  man  who,  writing  so  wisely, 
could  see  the  greater  wisdom  of  silence. 

The  opposition  to  the  Conscription  Law  may  be  treated 
simply  as  one  element  in  the  propaganda  of  the  official 
Opposition  to  the  Administration.  The  opposition  to 
such  a  measure  which  we  might  possibly  have  expected 
to  arise  from  churches,  or  from  schools  of  thought  inde 
pendent  of  the  ordinary  parties,  does  not  seem,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  to  have  arisen.  The  Democratic  party 
had,  as  we  have  seen,  revived  in  force  in  the  latter  part  of 
1862.  Persons,  ambitious,  from  whatever  mixture  of 
motives,  of  figuring  as  leaders  of  opposition  during  a  war 
which  they  did  not  condemn,  found  a  public  to  which  to 
appeal,  mainly  because  the  war  was  not  going  well. 
They  found  a  principle  of  opposition  satisfactory  to 
themselves  in  condemning  the  Proclamation  of  Emanci 
pation.  (It  was  significant  that  McClellan  shortly  after 
the  Proclamation  issued  a  General  Order  enjoining 
obedience  to  the  Government  and  adding  the  hint  that 
"  the  remedy  for  political  errors,  if  any  are  committed, 
is  to  be  found  only  in  the  action  of  the  people  at  the 
polls.")  In  the  curious  creed  which  respectable  men, 
with  whom  allegiance  to  an  ancient  party  could  be  a 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          373 

powerful  motive  at  such  a  time,  were  driven  to  construct 
for  themselves,  enforcement  of  the  duty  to  defend  the 
country  and  liberation  of  the  enemy's  slaves  appeared  as 
twin  offences  against  the  sacred  principles  of  constitu 
tional  freedom.  It  would  have  been  monstrous  to  say 
that  most  of  the  Democrats  were  opposed  to  the  war. 
Though  a  considerable  number  had  always  disliked  it 
and  now  found  courage  to  speak  loudly,  the  bulk  were 
as  loyal  to  the  Union  as  those  very  strong  Republi 
cans  like  Greeley,  who  later  on  despaired  of  maintaining 
it.  But  there  were  naturally  Democrats  for  whom  a 
chance  now  appeared  in  politics,  and  who  possessed  that 
common  type  of  political  mind  that  meditates  deeply 
on  minor  issues  and  is  inflamed  by  zeal  against  minor 
evils.  Such  men  began  to  debate  with  their  consciences 
whether  the  wicked  Government  might  not  become  more 
odious  than  the  enemy.  There  arose,  too,  as  there  often 
arises  in  war  time,  a  fraternal  feeling  between  men  who 
hated  the  war  and  men  who  reflected  how  much  better 
they  could  have  waged  it  themselves. 

There  was,  of  course,  much  in  the  conduct  of  the  Govern 
ment  which  called  for  criticism,  and  on  that  account  it 
was  a  grievous  pity  that  independence  should  have 
stultified  itself  by  reviving  in  any  form  the  root  principle 
of  party  government,  and  recognising  as  the  best  critics 
of  the  Administration  men  who  desired  to  take  its  place. 
More  useful  censure  of  the  Government  at  that  time 
might  have  come  from  men  who,  if  they  had  axes  to 
grind,  would  have  publicly  thrown  them  away.  There 
were  two  points  which  especially  called  for  criticism, 
apart  from  military  administration,  upon  which,  as  it 
happened,  Lincoln  knew  more  than  his  critics  knew  and 
more  than  he  could  say.  One  of  these  points  was 
extravagance  and  corruption  in  the  matter  of  army 
contracts  and  the  like  ;  these  evils  were  dangerously 
prevalent,  but  members  of  the  Cabinet  were  as  anxious 
to  prevent  them  as  any  outside  critic  could  be,  and  it 
was  friendly  help,  not  censure,  that  was  required.  The 
other  point  was  the  exercise  of  martial  law,  a  difficult 
question,  upon  which  a  word  must  here  be  said,  but  upon 


374  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

which  only  those  could  usefully  have  spoken  out  whose 
general  support  of  the  Government  was  pronounced  and 
sincere. 

In  almost  every  rebellion  or  civil  war  statesmen  and 
the  military  officers  under  them  are  confronted  with  the 
need,  for  the  sake  of  the  public  safety  or  even  of  ordinary 
justice,  of  rules  and  procedure  which  the  law  in  peace 
time  would  abhor.  In  great  conflicts,  such  as  our  own 
wars  after  the  French  Revolution  and  the  American  Civil 
War,  statesmen  such  as  Pitt  and  Lincoln,  capable  of 
handling  such  a  problem  well,  have  had  their  hands  full 
of  yet  more  urgent  matters.  The  puzzling  part  of  the 
problem  does  not  lie  in  the  neighbourhood  of  the  actual 
fighting,  where  for  the  moment  there  can  be  no  law  but  the 
will  of  the  commander,  but  in  the  districts  more  dis 
tantly  affected,  or  in  the  period  when  the  war  is  smoulder 
ing  out.  Lincoln's  Government  had  at  first  to  guard 
itself  against  dangerous  plots  which  could  be  scented 
but  not  proved  in  Washington  ;  later  on  it  had  to  answer 
such  questions  as  this  :  What  should  be  done  when  a 
suspected  agent  of  the  enemy  is  vaguely  seen  to  be 
working  against  enlistment,  when  an  attack  by  the  civil 
mob  upon  the  recruits  is  likely  to  result,  and  when  the 
local  magistrate  and  police  are  not  much  to  be  trusted  ? 
There  is  ^no  doubt  that  Seward  at  the  beginning,  and 
Stanton  persistently,  and  zealous  local  commanders  now 
and  then  solved  such  problems  in  a  very  hasty  fashion, 
or  that  Lincoln  throughout  was  far  more  anxious  to 
stand  by  vigorous  agents  of  the  Government  than  to 
correct  them. 

Lincoln  claimed  that  as  Commander-in-Chief  he  had 
during  the  continuance  of  civil  war  a  lawful  authority 
over  the  lives  and  liberties  of  all  citizens,  whether  loyal 
or  otherwise,  such  as  any  military  commander  exercises 
in  hostile  country  occupied  by  his  troops.  He  held 
that  there  was  no  proper  legal  remedy  for  persons 
injured  under  this  authority  except  by  impeachment 
of  himself.  He  held,  further,  that  this  authority 
extended  to  every  place  to  which  the  action  of  the 
enemy  in  any  form  extended  —  that  is,  to  the  whole 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          375 

country.     This  he  took  to  be  the  doctrine  of  English 
Common  Law,  and  he  contended  that  the  Constitution 
left  this  doctrine  in  full  force.     Whatever  may  be  said 
as  to  his  view  of  the  Common  Law  doctrine,  his  con 
struction  of   the  Constitution  would  now  be  held  by 
everyone  to  have  been  wrong.     Plainly  read,  the  Con 
stitution    swept    away    the    whole    of    that    somewhat 
undefined  doctrine  of  martial  law  which  may  be  found 
in  some  decisions  of  our  Courts,  and  it  did  much  more. 
Every  Legislature  in  the  British  Empire  can,  subject  to 
the   veto   of   the    Crown,    enact   whatever   exceptional 
measures   of  public   safety  it   thinks   necessary  in   an 
emergency.    The  Constitution  restricted  this  legislative 
power    within    the   very   narrowest    limits.     There    is, 
moreover,  a   recognised   British   practice,    initiated   by 
Wellington  and  Castlereagh,  by  which  all  question  as  to 
the  authority  of  martial  law  is  avoided  ;    a  governor  or 
commander  during  great  public  peril  is  encouraged  to 
consider    what    is    right    and    necessary,  not    what    is 
lawful,  knowing  that  if  necessary  there  will  be  enquiry 
into  his   conduct   afterwards,   but  knowing  also  that, 
unless  he  acts  quite  unconscionably,  he  and  his  agents 
will  be  protected  by  an  Act  of  Indemnity  from  the  legal 
consequences  of  whatever  they  have  done  in  good  faith. 
The  American  Constitution  would  seem  to  render  any 
such  Act  of  Indemnity  impossible.     In  a  strictly  legal 
sense,    therefore,    the   power   which   Lincoln   exercised 
must  be  said  to  have  been  usurped.     The  arguments  by 
which  he  defended  his  own  legality  read  now  as  good 
arguments  on  what  the  law  should  have  been,  but  bad 
arguments  on  what  the  law  was.     He  did  not,  perhaps, 
attach  extreme  importance  to  this  legal  contention,  for 
he  declared  plainly  that  he  was  ready  to  break  the  law  in 
minor  matters  rather  than  let  the  whole  fabric  of  law 
go  to  ruin.     This,  however,  does  not  prove  that  he  was 
insincere  when  he  pleaded  legal  as  well  as  moral  justifica 
tion  ;  he  probably  regarded  the  Constitution  in  a  manner 
which  modern  lawyers  find  it  difficult    to  realise ;  he 
probably  applied  in  construing  it  a  principle  such  as 
Hamilton  laid  down  for  the  construction  of  statutes, 


376  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

that  it  was  "  qualified  and  controlled"  by  the  Common 
Law  and  by  considerations  of  "  convenience  "  and  of 
"  reason "  and  of  the  policy  which  its  framers,  as 
wise  and  honest  men,  would  have  followed  in  present 
circumstances  ;  he  probably  would  have  adapted  to 
the  occasion  Hamilton's  position  that  "  construction 
may  be  made  against  the  letter  of  the  statute  to  render 
it  agreeable  to  natural  justice." 

In  the  exercise  of  his  supposed  prerogative  Lincoln 
sanctioned  from  beginning  to  end  of  the  war  the  arrest 
of  many  suspected  dangerous  persons  under  what  may 
be  called  "  lettres  de  cachet  "  from  Seward  and  after 
wards  from  Stanton.  He  publicly  professed  in  1863  his 
regret  that  he  had  not  caused  this  to  be  done  in  cases, 
such  as  those  of  Lee  and  Joseph  Johnston,  where  it  had 
not  been  done.  When  agitation  arose  on  the  matter  in 
the  end  of  1862  many  political  prisoners  were,  no  doubt 
wisely,  released.  Congress  then  proceeded,  in  1863,  to 
exercise  such  powers  in  the  matter  as  the  Constitution 
gave  it  by  an  Act  suspending,  where  the  President  thought 
fit,  the  privilege  of  the  writ  of  habeas  corpus.  A  decision 
of  the  Supreme  Court,  delivered  curiously  enough  by 
Lincoln's  old  friend  David  Davis,  showed  that  the  real 
effect  of  this  Act,  so  far  as  valid  under  the  Constitution, 
was  ridiculously  small  (see  Ex  parte  Milligan,  4  Russell, 
2).  In  any  case  the  Act  was  hedged  about  with  many 
precautions.  These  were  entirely  disregarded  by  the 
Government,  which  proceeded  avowedly  upon  Lincoln's 
theory  of  martial  law.  The  whole  country  was  eventually 
proclaimed  to  be  under  martial  law,  and  many  persons 
were  at  the  orders  of  the  local  military  commander  tried 
and  punished  by  court-martial  for  offences,  such  as  the 
discouragement  of  enlistment  or  the  encouragement  of 
desertion,  which  might  not  have  been  punishable  by  the 
ordinary  law,  or  of  which  the  ordinary  Courts  might  not 
have  convicted  them.  This  fresh  outbreak  of  martial 
law  must  in  large  part  be  ascribed  to  Lincoln's  determina 
tion  that  the  Conscription  Act  should  not  be  frustrated  ; 
but  apart  from  offences  relating  to  enlistment  there  was 
from  1863  onwards  no  lack  of  seditious  plots  fomented 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          377 

by  the  agents  of  the  Confederacy  in  Canada,  and  there 
were  .several  secret  societies,  "  knights "  of  this,  that, 
or  the  other.  Lincoln,  it  is  true,  scoffed  at  these,  but 
very  often  the  general  on  the  spot  thought  seriously  of 
them,  and  the  extreme  Democratic  leader,  Vallandigham, 
boasted  that  there  were  half  a  million  men  in  the  North 
enrolled  in  such  seditious  organisations.  Drastic  as  the 
Government  proceedings  were,  the  opposition  to  them 
died  down  before  the  popular  conviction  that  strong 
measures  were  necessary,  and  the  popular  appreciation 
that  the  blood-thirsty  despot  "  King  Abraham  L,"  as 
some  Democrats  were  pleased  to  call  him,  was  not  of  the 
stuff  of  which  despots  were  made  and  was  among  the 
least  blood-thirsty  men  living.  The  civil  Courts  made 
no  attempt  to  interfere  ;  they  said  that,  whatever  the 
law,  they  could  not  in  fact  resist  generals  commanding 
armies.  British  Courts  would  in  many  cases  have  de 
clined  to  interfere,  not  on  the  ground  that  the  general  had 
the  might,  but  on  the  ground  that  he  had  the  right ;  yet, 
it  seems,  they  would  not  quite  have  relinquished  their 
hold  on  the  matter,  but  would  have  held  themselves 
free  to  consider  whether  the  district  in  which  martial 
law  v/as  exercised  was  materially  affected  by  the  state 
of  war  or  not.  The  legal  controversy  ended  in  a  manner 
hardly  edifying  to  the  laymen  ;  in  the  course  of  1865  the 
Supreme  Court  solemnly  tried  out  the  question  of  the 
right  of  one  Milligan  to  a  writ  of  habeas  corpus.  At  that 
time  the  war,  the  only  ground  on  which  the  right  could 
have  been  refused  him,  had  for  some  months  been  ended  ; 
and  nobody  in  court  knew  or  cared  whether  Milligan  was 
then  living  to  enjoy  his  right  or  had  been  shot  long  before. 
Save  in  a  few  cases  of  special  public  interest,  Lincoln 
took  no  personal  part  in  the  actual  administration  of  these 
-coercive  measures.  So  great  a  tax  was  put  upon  his 
time,  and  indeed  his  strength,  by  the  personal  considera 
tion  of  cases  of  discipline  in  the  army,  that  he  could  not 
possibly  have  undertaken  a  further  labour  of  the  sort. 
Moreover,  he  thought  it  more  necessary  for  the  public 
good  to  give  steady  support  to  his  ministers  and  generals 
than  to  check  their  action  in  detail.  He  contended  that 


378  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

no  great  injustice  was  likely  to  arise.  Very  likely  he  was 
wrong ;  not  only  Democrats,  but  men  like  Senator  John 
Sherman,  a  strong  and  sensible  Republican,  thought 
him  wrong.  There  are  evil  stories  about  the  secret 
police  under  Stanton,  and  some  records  of  the  proceedings 
of  the  courts-martial,  composed  sometimes  of  the  officers 
least  useful  at  the  front,  are  not  creditable.  Very  likely, 
as  John  Sherman  thought,  the  ordinary  law  would  have 
met  the  needs  of  the  case  in  many  districts.  The  mere 
number  of  the  political  prisoners,  who  counted  by 
thousands,  proves  nothing,  for  the  least  consideration  of 
the  circumstances  will  show  that  the  active  supporters  of 
the  Confederacy  in  the  North  must  have  been  very 
numerous.  Nor  does  it  matter  much  that,  to  the  horror 
of  some  people,  there  were  persons  of  station,  culture, 
and  respectability  among  the  sufferers ;  persons  of  this 
kind  were  not  likely  to  be  exposed  to  charges  of  dis 
loyal  conduct  if  they  were  actively  loyal.  Obscure  and 
ignorant  men  are  much  more  likely  to  have  become  the 
innocent  victims  of  spiteful  accusers  or  vile  agents  of 
police.  Doubtless  this  might  happen  ;  but  that  does 
not  of  itself  condemn  Lincoln  for  having  maintained  an 
extreme  form  of  martial  law.  The  particular  kind  of 
oppression  that  is  likely  to  have  occurred  is  one 
against  which  the  normal  procedure  of  justice  and 
police  in  America  is  said  to-day  to  provide  no  suffi 
cient  safeguard.  It  is  almost  certain  that  the  regular 
course  of  law  would  have  exposed  the  public  weal 
to  formidable  dangers  ;  but  it  by  no  means  follows  that 
it  would  have  saved  individuals  from  wrong.  The 
risk  that  many  individuals  would  be  grievously  wronged 
was  at  least  not  very  great.  The  Government  was  not 
pursuing  men  for  erroneous  opinions,  but  for  certain 
very  definite  kinds  of  action  dangerous  to  the  State. 
These  were  indeed  kinds  of  action  with  which  Lincoln 
thought  ordinary  Courts  of  justice  "utterly incompetent" 
to  deal,  and  he  avowed  that  he  aimed  rather  at  preventing 
intended  actions  than  at  punishing  them  when  done. 
To  some  minds  this  will  seem  to  be  an  attitude  dangerous 
to  liberty,  but  he  was  surely  justified  when  he  said,  "  In 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          379 

such  cases  the  purposes  of  men  are  much  more  easily 
understood  than  in  cases  of  ordinary  crime.  The  man 
who  stands  by  and  says  nothing  when  the  peril  of  his 
Government  is  discussed  cannot  be  misunderstood.  If 
not  hindered,  he  is  sure  to  help  the  enemy,  much  more 
if  he  talks  ambiguously — talks  for  his  country  with  '  buts ' 
and  '  ifs  '  and  '  ands.'  '  In  any  case,  Lincoln  stood 
clearly  and  boldly  for  repressing  speech  or  act,  that  could 
help  the  enemy,  with  extreme  vigour  and  total  disregard 
for  the  legalities  of  peace  time.  A  little  later  on  we  shall 
see  fully  whether  this  imported  on  his  part  any  touch 
whatever  of  the  ferocity  which  it  may  seem  to  suggest. 

The  Democratic  opposition  which  made  some  headway 
in  the  first  half  of  1863  comprised  a  more  extreme 
opposition  prevailing  in  the  West  and  led  by  Clement 
Vallandigham,  a  Congressman  from  Ohio,  and  a  milder 
opposition  led  by  Horatio  Seymour,  who  from  the  end  of 
1862  to  the  end  of  1864,  when  he  failed  of  re-election, 
was  Governor  of  New  York  State.  The  extreme  section 
were  often  called  "  Copperheads,"  after  a  venomous 
snake  of  that  name.  Strictly,  perhaps,  this  political  term 
should  be  limited  to  the  few  who  went  so  far  as  to  desire 
the  victory  of  the  South  ;  more  loosely  it  was  applied  to 
a  far  larger  number  who  went  no  further  than  to  say  that 
the  war  should  be  stopped.  This  demand,  it  must  be 
observed,  was  based  upon  the  change  of  policy  shown  in 
the  Proclamation  of  Emancipation.  "  The  war  for  the 
Union,"  said  Vallandigham  in  Congress  in  January, 
1863,  "  is  in  your  hands  a  most  bloody  and  costly 
failure.  War  for  the  Union  was  abandoned  ;  war  for 
the  negro  openly  begun.  With  what  success  ?  Let  the 
dead  at  Fredericksburg  answer. — Ought  this  war  to 
continue  ?  I  answer  no — not  a  day,  not  an  hour.  What 
then  ?  Shall  we  separate  ?  Again  I  answer,  no,  no,  no. 
— Stop  fighting.  Make  an  armistice.  Accept  at  once 
friendly  foreign  mediation."  And  further  :  "  The  secret 
but  real  purpose  of  the  war  was  to  abolish  slavery  in  the 
States,  and  with  it  the  change  of  our  present  democratical 
form  of  government  into  an  imperial  despotism."  This 
was  in  no  sense  treason  ;  it  was  merely  humbug.  The 


380  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

alleged  design  to  establish  despotism,  chiefly  revealed 
at  that  moment  by  the  liberation  of  slaves,  had  of  course 
no  existence.  Equally  false,  as  will  be  seen  later,  was 
the  whole  suggestion  that  any  peace  could  have  been 
had  with  the  South  except  on  the  terms  of  separation. 
Vallandigham,  a  demagogue  of  real  vigour,  had  perhaps 
so  much  honesty  as  is  compatible  with  self-deception  ; 
at  any  rate,  upon  his  subsequent  visit  to  the  South  his 
intercourse  with  Southern  leaders  was  conducted  on  the 
footing  that  the  Union  should  be  restored.  But  his 
character  inspired  no  respect.  Burnside,  now  command 
ing  the  troops  in  Ohio,  held  that  violent  denunciation  of 
the  Government  in  a  tone  that  tended  to  demoralise 
the  troops  was  treason,  since  it  certainly  was  not 
patriotism,  and  when  in  May,  1863,  Vallandigham  made 
a  very  violent  and  offensive  speech  in  Ohio  he  had  him 
arrested  in  his  house  at  night,  and  sent  him  before  a 
court-martial  which  imprisoned  him.  Loud  protest  was 
raised  by  every  Democrat.  This  worry  came  upon 
Lincoln  just  after  Chancellorsville.  He  regretted  Burn- 
side's  action — later  on  he  had  to  reverse  the  rash  suppres 
sion  of  a  newspaper  by  which  Burnside  provoked  violent 
indignation — but  on  this  occasion  he  would  only  say  in 
public  that  he  "  regretted  the  necessity  "  of  such  action. 
Evidently  he  thought  it  his  duty  to  support  a  well- 
intentioned  general  against  a  dangerous  agitator.  The 
course  which  after  some  consideration  he  took  was  of  the 
nature  of  a  practical  joke,  perhaps  justified  by  its  success. 
Vallandigham  was  indeed  released  ;  he  was  taken  to 
the  front  and  handed  over  to  the  Confederates  as  if  he 
had  been  an  exchanged  prisoner  of  war.  In  reply  to 
demands  from  the  Democratic  organisation  in  Ohio  that 
Vallandigham  might  be  allowed  to  return  home,  Lincoln 
offered  to  consent  if  their  leaders  would  sign  a  pledge  to 
support  the  war  and  promote  the  efficiency  of  the  army. 
This  they  called  an  evasion.  Vallandigham  made  his 
way  to  Canada  and  conducted  intrigues  from  thence. 
In  his  absence  he  was  put  up  for  the  governorship  of  Ohio 
in  November,  but  defeated  by  a  huge  majority,  doubtless 
the  larger  because  of  Gettysburg  and  Vicksburg.  The 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          381 

next  year  he  suddenly  returned  home,  braving  the  chance 
of  arrest,  and,  probably  to  his  disappointment,  Lincoln 
let  him  be.  In  reply  to  protests  against  Vallandigham's 
arrest  which  had  been  sent  by  meetings  in  Ohio  and  New 
York,  Lincoln  had  written  clear  defences  of  his  action, 
from  which  the  foregoing  account  of  his  views  on  martial 
law  has  been  taken.  In  one  of  them  was  a  sentence 
which  probably  went  further  with  the  people  of  the  North 
than  any  other  :  "  Must  I  shoot  a  simple-minded  soldier 
boy  who  deserts,  while  I  must  not  touch  a  hair  of  a  wily 
agitator  who  induces  him  to  desert  ?  "  There  may  or 
may  not  be  some  fallacy  lurking  here,  but  it  must  not 
be  supposed  that  this  sentence  came  from  a  pleader's 
ingenuity.  It  was  the  expression  of  a  man  really 
agonised  by  his  weekly  task  of  confirming  sentences  on 
deserters  from  the  army. 

Governor  Seymour  was  a  more  presentable  antagonist 
than  Vallandigham.  He  did  not  propose  to  stop  the 
war.  On  the  contrary,  his  case  was  that  the  war  could 
only  be  effectively  carried  on  by  a  law-abiding  Govern 
ment,  which  would  unite  the  people  by  maintaining  the 
Constitution,  not,  as  the  Radicals  argued,  by  the 
flagitious  policy  of  freeing  the  slaves.  It  should  be 
added  that  he  was  really  concerned  at  the  corruption 
which  was  becoming  rife,  for  which  war  contracts  gave 
some  scope,  and  which,  with  a  critic's  obliviousness  to 
the  limitations  of  human  force,  he  thought  the  most 
heavily-burdened  Administration  of  its  time  could  easily 
have  put  down.  With  a  little  imagination  it  is  easy  to 
understand  the  difficult  position  of  the  orthodox  Demo 
crats,  who  two  years  before  had  voted  against  restricting 
the  extension  of  slavery,  and  were  now  asked  for  the  sake 
of  the  Union  to  support  a  Government  which  was 
actually  abolishing  slavery  by  martial  law.  Also  the 
attitude  of  the  thoroughly  self-righteous  partisan  is 
perfectly  usual.  Many  of  Governor  "Seymour's  utter 
ances  were  fair  enough,  and  much  of  his  conduct  was 
patriotic  enough.  His  main  proceedings  can  be  briefly 
summarised.  His  election  as  Governor  in  the  end  of 
1 862  was  regarded  as  an  important  event,  the  appearance 


382  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

of  a  new  leader  holding  an  office  of  the  greatest  influence. 
Lincoln,  assuming,  as  he  had  a  right  to  do,  the  full 
willingness  of  Seymour  to  co-operate  in  prosecuting  the 
war,  did  the  simplest  and  best  thing.  He  wrote  and 
invited  Seymour  after  his  inauguration  in  March,  1863, 
to  a  personal  conference  with  himself  as  to  the  ways  in 
which,  with  their  divergent  views,  they  could  best 
co-operate.  The  Governor  waited  three  weeks  before  he 
acknowledged  this  letter.  He  then  wrote  and  promised  a 
full  reply  later.  He  never  sent  this  reply.  He  pro 
tested  energetically  and  firmly  against  the  arrest  of 
Vallandigham.  In  July,  1863,  the  Conscription  Act 
began  to  be  put  in  force  in  New  York  city  ;  then  occurred 
the  only  serious  trouble  that  ever  did  occur  under  the 
Act  ;  and  it  was  very  serious.  A  mob  of  foreign  immi 
grants,  mainly  Irish,  put  a  forcible  stop  to  the  proceeding 
of  the  draft.  It  set  fire  to  the  houses  of  prominent 
Republicans,  and  prevented  the  fire  brigade  from  saving 
them.  It  gave  chase  to  all  negroes  that  it  met,  beating 
some  to  death,  stringing  up  others  to  trees  and  lamp-posts 
and  burning  them  as  they  hung.  It  burned  down  an 
orphanage  for  coloured  children  after  the  police  had 
with  difficulty  saved  its  helpless  inmates.  Four  days 
of  rioting  prevailed  throughout  the  city  before  the  arrival 
of  fresh  troops  restored  order.  After  an  interval  of 
prudent  length  the  draft  was  successfully  carried  out. 
Governor  Seymour  arrived  in  the  city  during  the  riots. 
He  harangued  this  defiled  mob  in  gentle  terms,  promising 
them,  if  they  would  be  good,  to  help  them  in  securing 
redress  of  the  grievance  to  which  he  attributed  their 
conduct.  Thenceforward  to  the  end  of  his  term  of  office 
he  persecuted  Lincoln  with  complaints  as  to  the  unfair 
ness  of  the  quota  imposed  on  certain  districts  under  the 
Conscription  Act.  It  is  true  that  he  also  protested  on 
presumably  sincere  constitutional  grounds  against  the 
Act  itself,  begging  Lincoln  to  suspend  its  enforcement 
till  its  validity  had  been  determined  by  the  Courts.  As 
to  this  Lincoln  most  properly  agreed  to  facilitate,  if  he 
could,  an  appeal  to  the  Supreme  Court, -but  declined,  on 
the  ground  of  urgent  military  necessity,  to  delay  the 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          383 

drafts  in  the  meantime.  Seymour's  obstructive  con 
duct,  however,  was  not  confined  to  the  intelligible  ground 
of  objection  to  the  Act  itself  ;  it  showed  itself  in  the 
perpetual  assertion  that  the  quotas  were  unfair.  No 
complaint  as  to  this  had  been  raised  before  the  riots. 
It  seems  that  a  quite  unintended  error  may  in  fact  at 
first  have  been  made.  Lincoln,  however,  immediately 
reduced  the  quotas  in  question  to  the  full  extent  which 
the  alleged  error  would  have  required.  Fresh  complaints 
from  Seymour  followed,  and  so  on  to  the  end.  Ulti 
mately  Seymour  was  invited  to  come  to  Washington 
and  have  out  the  whole  matter  of  his  complaints  in 
conference  with  Stanton.  Like  a  prudent  man,  he  again 
refused  to  face  personal  Conference.  It  seems  that 
Governor  Seymour,  who  was  a  great  person  in  his  day, 
was  very  decidedly,  in  the  common  acceptance  of  the 
term,  a  gentleman.  This  has  been  counted  unto  him 
for  righteousness.  It  should  rather  be  treated  as  an 
aggravation  of  his  very  unmeritable  conduct. 

Thus,  since  the  Proclamation  of  Emancipation  the 
North  had  again  become  possessed  of  what  is  sometimes 
considered  a  necessity  of  good  government,  an  organised 
Opposition  ready  and  anxious  to  take  the  place  of  the 
existing  Administration.  It  can  well  be  understood  that 
honourable  men  entered  into  this  combination,  but  it  is 
difficult  to  conceive  on  what  common  principle  they 
could  hold  together  which  would  not  have  been  disastrous 
in  its  working.  The  more  extreme  leaders,  who  were 
likely  to  prove  the  driving  force  among  them,  were  not 
unfitly  satirised  in  a  novel  of  the  time  called  the  "  Man 
Without  a  Country."  Their  chance  of  success  in  fact 
depended  upon  the  ill-fortune  of  their  country  in  the  war 
and  on  the  irritation  against  the  Government,  which 
could  be  aroused  by  that  cause  alone  and  not  by  such 
abuses  as  they  fairly  criticised.  In  the  latter  part  of 
1 863  the  war  was  going  well.  A  great  meeting  of  "  Union 
men  "  was  summoned  in  August  in  Illinois.  Lincoln 
was  tempted  to  go  and  speak  to  them,  but  he  contented 
himself  with  a  letter.  Phrases  in  it  might  suggest  the 
stump  orator,  more  than  in  fact  his  actual  stump 


384  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

speeches  usually  did.  In  it,  however,  he  made  plain  in 
the  simplest  language  the  total  fallacy  of  such  talk  of 
peace  as  had  lately  become  common  ;  the  Confederacy 
meant  the  Confederate  army  and  the  men  who  controlled 
it  ;  as  a  fact  no  suggestion  of  peace  or  compromise  came 
from  them  ;  if  it  ever  came,  the  people  should  know  it. 
In  equally  simple  terms  he  sought  to  justify,  even  to 
supporters  of  the  Union  who  did  not  share  his  "  wish 
that  all  men  could  be  free,"  his  policy  in  regard  to 
emancipation.  In  any  case,  freedom  had  for  the  sake  of 
the  Union  been  promised  to  negroes  who  were  now 
fighting  or  working  for  the  North,  "  and  the  promise  being 
made  must  be  kept."  As  that  most  critical  year  of  the 
war  drew  to  a  close  there  was  a  prevailing  recognition 
that  the  rough  but  straight  path  along  which  the 
President  groped  his  way  was  the  right  path,  and  upon 
the  whole  he  enjoyed  a  degree  of  general  favour  which 
was  not  often  his  portion. 

3.  Ike  War  in  1864. 

It  is  the  general  military  opinion  that  before  the  war 
entered  on  its  final  stage  Jefferson  Davis  should  have 
concentrated  all  his  forces  for  a  larger  invasion  of  the 
North  than  was  ever  in  fact  undertaken.  In  the  Gettys 
burg  campaign  he  might  have  strengthened  Lee's  army 
by  20,000  men  if  he  could  have  withdrawn  them  from 
the  forts  at  Charleston.  Charleston,  however,  was 
threatened  during  1863  by  the  sea  and  land  forces  of  the 
North,  in  an  expedition  which  was  probably  itself 
unwise,  as  Lincoln  himself  seems  to  have  suspected,  but 
which  helped  to  divert  a  Confederate  army.  In  the  be 
ginning  of  1 864  Davis  still  kept  this  force  at  Charleston  ; 
he  persisted  also  in  keeping  a  hold  on  his  own  State, 
Mississippi,  with  a  further  small  army ;  while  Long- 
street  still  remained  in  the  south-east  corner  of  Tennessee, 
where  a  useful  employment  of  his  force  was  contemplated 
but  none  was  made.  The  chief  Southern  armies  with 
which  we  have  to  deal  are  that  of  Lee,  lying  south  of 
the  Rapidan,  and  that  of  Bragg,  now  superseded  by 
Joseph  Johnston,  at  Dalton,  south  of  Chattanooga.  The 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          385 

Confederacy,  it  is  thought,  was  now  in  a  position  in 
which  it  might  take  long  to  reduce  it,  but  the  only 
military  chance  for  it  was  concentration  on  one  great 
counter-stroke.  This  seems  to  have  been  the  opinion  of 
Lee  and  Longstreet.  Jefferson  Davis  clung,  even  late 
in  the  year  1864,  to  the  belief  that  disaster  must  somehow 
overtake  any  invading  Northern  army  which  pushed 
far.  "Possibly  he  reckoned  also  that  the  North  would 
weary  of  the  repeated  checks  in  the  process  of  conquest. 
Indeed,  as  will  be  seen  later,  the  North  came  near  to 
doing  so,  while  a  serious  invasion  of  the  North,  unless 
overwhelmingly  successful,  might  really  have  revived  its 
spirit.  In  any  case  Jefferson  Davis,  unlike  Lincoln,  had 
no  desire  to  be  guided  by  his  best  officers.  He  was  for 
ever  quarrelling  with  Joseph  Johnston  and  often  with 
Beauregard  ;  the  less  capable  Bragg,  though  removed 
from  the  West,  was  now  installed  as  his  chief  adviser  in 
Richmond ;  and  the  genius  of  Lee  was  not  encouraged 
to  apply  itself  to  the  larger  strategy  of  the  war. 

At  the  beginning  of  1864  an  advance  from  Chatta 
nooga  southward  into  the  heart  of  the  Confederate 
country  was  in  contemplation.  Grant  and  Farragut 
wished  that  it  should  be  supported  by  a  joint  military 
and  naval  attack  upon  Mobile,  in  Alabama,  on  the  Gulf  of 
Mexico.  Other  considerations  on  the  part  of  the  Govern 
ment  prevented  this.  In  1863  Marshal  Bazaine  had 
invaded  Mexico  to  set  up  Louis  Napoleon's  ill-fated 
client  the  Archduke  Maximilian  as  Emperor.  As  the 
so-called  "  Monroe  Doctrine  "  (really  attributable  to  the 
teaching  of  Hamilton  and  the  action  of  John  Quincy 
Adams,  who  was  Secretary  of  State  under  President 
Monroe)  declared,  such  an  extension  of  European 
influence,  more  especially  dynastic  influence,  on  the 
American  continent  was  highly  unacceptable  to  the 
United  States.  Many  in  the  North  were  much  excited, 
so  much  so  that  during  1864  a  preposterous  resolution, 
which  meant,  if  anything,  war  with  France,  was  passed 
on  the  motion  of  one  Henry  Winter  Davis.  It  was  of 
course  the  business  of  Lincoln  and  of  Seward,  now 
moulded  to  his  views,  to  avoid  this  disaster,  and  yet, 


386  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

with  such  dignity  as  the  situation  allowed,  keep  the 
French  Government  aware  of  the  enmity  which  they 
might  one  day  incur.  They  did  this.  But  they  ap 
prehended  that  the  French,  with  a  footing  for  the 
moment  in  Mexico,  had  designs  on  Texas  ;  and  thus, 
though  the  Southern  forces  in  Texas  were  cut  off  from 
the  rest  of  the  Confederacy  and  there  was  no  haste  for 
subduing  them,  it  was  thought  expedient,  with  an  eye 
on  France,  to  assert  the  interest  of  the  Union  in  Texas. 
General  Banks,  in  Louisiana,  was  sent  to  Texas  with 
the  forces  which  would  otherwise  have  been  sent  to 
Mobile.  His  various  endeavours  ended  in  May,  1864, 
with  the  serious  defeat  of  an  expedition  up  the  Red  River. 
This  defeat  gave  great  annoyance  to  the  North  and  made 
an  end  of  Banks'  reputation.  It  might  conceivably 
have  had  a  calamitous  sequel  in  the  capture  by  the  South 
of  Admiral  Porter's  river  flotilla,  which  accompanied 
Banks,  and  the  consequent  undoing  of  the  conquest  of 
the  Mississippi.  As  it  was  it  wasted  much  force. 

Before  Grant  could  safely  launch  his  forces  southward 
from  Chattanooga  against  Johnston,  it  was  necessary  to 
deal  in  some  way  with  the  Confederate  force  still  at  large 
in  Mississippi.  Grant  determined  to  do  this  by  the  destruc 
tion  of  the  railway  system  by  which  alone  it  could  move 
eastward.  For  this  purpose  he  left  Thomas  to  hold 
Chattanooga,  while  Sherman  was  sent  to  Meridian,  the 
chief  railway  centre  in  the  Southern  part  of  Mississippi. 
In  February  Sherman  arrived  there,  and,  though  a 
subsidiary  force,  sent  from  Memphis  on  a  similar  but 
less  important  errand  somewhat  further  north,  met  with 
a  severe  repulse,  he  was  able  unmolested  to  do  such 
damage  to  the  lines  around  Meridian  as  to  secure  Grant's 
purpose. 

There  was  yet  a  further  preliminary  to  the  great  final 
struggle.  On  March  I,  1864,  pursuant  to  an  Act  of 
Congress  which  was  necessary  for  this  object,  Lincoln 
conferred  upon  Grant  the  rank  of  Lieutenant-General, 
never  held  by  anyone  else  since  Washington,  for  it  was 
only  brevet  rank  that  was  conferred  on  Scott.  There 
with  Grant;  took  the  command,  under  the  President,  of 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          387 

all  the  Northern  armies.  Grant  came  to  Washington  to 
receive  his  new  honour.  He  had  taken  leave  of  Sherman 
in  an  interchange  of  letters  which  it  is  good  to  read  ;  but 
he  had  intended  to  return  to  the  West.  Sherman,  who 
might  have  desired  the  command  in  the  West  for  himself, 
had  unselfishly  pressed  him  to  return.  He  feared  that 
the  dreaded  politicians  would  in  some  way  hurt  Grant, 
and  that  he  would  be  thwarted  by  them,  become 
disgusted,  and  retire ;  they  did  hurt  him,  but  not  then, 
nor  in  the  way  that  Sherman  had  expected.  Grant, 
however,  could  trust  Sherman  to  carry  out  the  work  he 
wanted  done  in  the  West,  and  he  now  saw  that,  as  Lincoln 
might  have  told  him  and  possibly  did,  the  work  he 
wanted  done  in  the  East  must  be  done  by  him.  He 
went  West  again  for  a  few  days  only,  to  settle  his  plans 
with  Sherman.  Sherman  with  his  army  of  100,000  was 
to  follow  Johnston's  army  of  about  60,000,  wherever  it 
went,  till  he  destroyed  it.  Grant  with  his  120,000  was 
to  keep  up  an  equally  unfaltering  fight  with  Lee's  army, 
also  of  60,000.  There  was,  of  course,  nothing  original 
about  this  conception  except  the  idea,  fully  present  to 
both  men's  minds,  of  the  risk  and  sacrifice  with  which  it 
was  worth  while  to  carry  it  out.  Lincoln  and  Grant  had 
never  met  till  this  month.  Grant  at  the  first  encounter 
was  evidently  somewhat  on  his  guard.  He  was  prepared 
to  like  Lincoln,  but  he  was  afraid  of  mistaken  dictation 
from  him,  and  determined  to  discourage  it.  Also  Stanton 
had  advised  him  that  Lincoln,  out  of  mere  good  nature, 
would  talk  unwisely  of  any  plans  discussed  with  him. 
This  was  probably  quite  unjust.  Stanton,  in  order  to 
keep  politicians  and  officers  in  their  places,  was  accus 
tomed  to  bite  off  the  noses  of  all  comers.  Lincoln,  on  the 
contrary,  would  talk  to  all  sorts  of  people  with  a  readiness 
which  was  sometimes  astonishing,  but  there  was  a  good 
deal  of  method  in  this — he  learnt  something  from  these 
people  all  the  time — and  he  certainly  had  a  very  great 
power  of  keeping  his  own  counsel  when  he  chose.  In  any 
case,  when  Grant  at  the  end  of  April  left  Washington  for 
the  front,  he  parted  with  Lincoln  on  terms  of  mutual 
trust  which  never  afterwards  varied.  Lincoln  in  fact 


388  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

satisfied  as  to  his  general  purpose,  had  been  happy  to  leave 
him  to  make  his  plans  for  himself.  He  wrote  to  Grant  : 
"  Not  expecting  to  see  you  again  before  the  spring 
campaign  begins,  I  wish  to  express  in  this  way  my  entire 
satisfaction  with  what  you  have  done  up  to  this  time  so 
far  as  I  understand  it.  The  particulars  of  your  plan  I 
neither  know  nor  seek  to  know.  You  are  vigilant  and 
self-reliant,  and,  pleased  with  this,  I  wish  not  to  obtrude 
any  constraints  or  restraints  upon  you.  While  I  am 
very  anxious  that  any  great  disaster  or  capture  of  our 
men  in  great  numbers  shall  be  avoided,  I  know  these 
points  are  less  likely  to  escape  your  attention  than  they 
would  be  mine.  If  there  is  anything  wanting  which  is 
within  my  power  to  give,  do  not  fail  to  let  me  know  it. 
And  now,  with  a  brave  army  and  a  just  cause,  may  God 
sustain  you."  Grant  replied  :  "  From  my  first  entrance 
into  the  volunteer  service  of  the  country  to  the  present 
day  I  have  never  had  cause  of  complaint — have  never 
expressed  or  implied  a  complaint  against  the  Adminis 
tration,  or  the  Secretary  of  War,  for  throwing  any 
embarrassment  in  the  way  of  my  vigorously  prosecuting 
what  appeared  to  me  my  duty.  Indeed,  since  the  pro 
motion  which  placed  me  in  command  of  all  the  armies, 
and  in  view  of  the  great  responsibility  and  importance 
of  success,  I  have  been  astonished  at  the  readiness  with 
which  everything  asked  for  has  been  yielded,  without 
even  an  explanation  being  asked.  Should  my  success 
be  less  than  I  desire  or  expect,  the  least  I  can  say  is,  the 
fault  is  not  with  you."  At  this  point  the  real  responsi 
bility  of  Lincoln  in  regard  to  military  events  became 
comparatively  small,  and  to  the  end  of  the  war  those 
events  may  be  traced  with  even  less  detail  than  has 
hitherto  been  necessary. 

Upon  joining  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  Grant  retained 
Meade,  with  whom  he  was  pleased,  in  a  somewhat 
anomalous  position  under  him  as  commander  of  that 
army.  "  Wherever  Lee  goes,"  he  told  him,  "  there  you 
will  go  too."  His  object  of  attack  was,  in  agreement 
with  the  opinion  which  Lincoln  had  from  an  early  date 
formed,  Lee's  army.  If  Lee  could  be  compelled,  or 


THE   APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          389 

should  choose,  to  shut  himself  up  in  Richmond,  as  did 
happen,  then  Richmond  would  become  an  object  of 
attack,  but  not  otherwise.  Grant,  however,  hoped  that 
he  might  force  Lee  to  give  him  battle  in  the  open.  In  the 
open  or  behind  entrenchments,  he  meant  to  fight  him, 
reckoning  that  if  he  lost  double  the  number  that  Lee  did, 
his  own  loss  could  easily  be  made  up,  but  Lee's  would  be 
irreparable.  His  hope  was  to  a  large  extent  disappointed. 
He  had  to  do  with  a  greater  general  than  himself,  who, 
with  his  men,  knew  every  inch  of  a  tangled  country. 
In  the  engagements  which  now  followed  Grant's  men 
were  constantly  being  hurled  against  chosen  positions, 
entrenched  and  with  the  new  device  of  wire  entangle 
ments  in  front  of  them.  "  I  mean,"  he  wrote,  "  to  fight  it 
out  on  this  line  if  it  takes  all  summer."  It  took  summer, 
autumn,  winter,  and  the  early  spring.  Once  across 
the  Rapidan  he  was  in  the  tract  of  scrubby  jungle  called 
the  Wilderness.  He  had  hoped  to  escape  out  of  this 
unopposed  and  at  the  same  time  to  turn  Lee's  right  by  a 
rapid  march  to  his  own  left.  But  he  found  Lee  in  his 
way.  On  May  5  and  6  there  was  stubborn  and  indecisive 
fighting,  with  a  loss  to  Grant  of  17,660  and  to  Lee  of 
perhaps  over  10,000 — from  Grant's  point  of  view  some 
thing  gained.  Then  followed  a  further  movement  to 
the  left  to  outflank  Lee.  Again  Lee  was  to  be  found  in  the 
way  in  a  chosen  position  of  his  own  near  Spotsylvania 
Court  House.  Here  on  the  five  days  from  May  8  to 
May  12  the  heavy  fighting  was  continued,  with  a  total 
loss  to  Grant  of  over  18,000  and  probably  a  proportionate 
loss  to  Lee.  Another  move  by  Grant  to  the  left  now 
caused  Lee  to  fall  back  to  a  position  beyond  the  North 
Anna  River,  on  which  an  attack  was  made  but  speedily 
given  up.  Further  movements  in  the  same  general 
direction,  but  without  any  such  serious  fighting — Grant 
still  endeavouring  to  turn  Lee's  right,  Lee  still  moving  so 
as  to  cover  Richmond — brought  Grant  by  the  end  of  the 
month  to  Cold  Harbour,  some  ten  miles  east  by  north  of 
Richmond,  close  upon  the  scene  of  McClellan's  misad 
ventures.  Meanwhile  Grant  had  caused  an  expedition 
under  General  Butler  to  go  by  sea  up  the  James,  and  to 


390  ABRAHAM   LINCOLN 

land  a  little  south  of  Richmond,  which,  with  the  con 
nected  fortress  of  Petersburg,  twenty-two  miles  to  the 
south  of  it,  had  only  a  weak  garrison  left.  Butler  was  a 
man  with  remarkable  powers  of  self-advertisement ;  he 
had  now  a  very  good  chance  of  taking  Petersburg,  but 
his  expedition  failed  totally.  From  June  i  to  June  3 
Grant;  was  occupied  on  the  most  disastrous  enterprise 
of  his  career,  a  hopeless  attack  upon  a  strong  entrenched 
position,  which,  with  the  lesser  encounters  that  took 
place  within  the  next  few  days,  cost  the  North  14,000 
men,  against  a  loss  to  the  South  which  has  been  put 
as  low  as  1,700.  It  was  the  one  battle  which  Grant 
regretted  having  fought.  He  gave  up  the  hope  of  a 
fight  with  Lee  on  advantageous  conditions  outside 
Richmond.  On  June  12  he  suddenly  moved  his  army, 
across  the  James  to  the  neighbourhood  of  City  Point, 
east  of  Petersburg.  Lee  must  now  stand  siege  in 
Richmond  and  Petersburg.  Had  he  now  marched 
north  against  Washington,  Grant  would  have  been  after 
him  and  would  have  secured  for  his  vastly  larger  force 
the  battle  in  the  open  which  he  had  so  far  vainly  s'bught. 
Yet  another  disappointment  followed.  On  July  30  an 
attempt  was  made  to  carry  Petersburg  by  assault 
immediately  after  the  explosion  of  an  enormous  mine. 
It  failed  with  heavy  loss,  through  the  fault  of  the  amiable 
but  injudicious  Burnside,  who  now  passed  into  civil  life, 
and  of  the  officers  under  him.  The  siege  was  to  be  a 
long  affair.  In  reality,  for  all  the  disappointment,  and 
in  spite  of  Grant's  confessed  mistake  at  Cold  Harbour, 
his  grim  plan  was  progressing.  The  force  which  the 
South  could  ill  spare  was  being  worn  down,  and  Grant 
was  in  a  position  in  which,  though  he  might  have  got 
there  at  less  cost,  and  though  the  end  would  not  be  yet, 
the  end  was  sure.  His  army  was  for  the  time  a  good  deal 
shaken,  and  the  estimation  in  which  the  West  Point 
officers  held  him  sank  low.  His  own  determination  was 
quite  unshaken,  and,  though  Lincoln  hinted  somewhat 
mildly  that  these  enormous  losses  ought  not  to  recur,  his 
confidence  in  Grant  was  unabated  too. 

People  in  Washington  who  had  watched  all  this  with 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          391 

alternations  of  feeling  that  ended  in  dejection  had  had 
another  trial  to  their  nerves  early  in  July.  The  Northern 
General  Sigel,  who  commanded  in  the  lower  part  of  the 
Shenandoah  Valley,  protecting  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio 
Railway,  had  marched  southward  in  June  in  pursuance 
of  a  subsidiary  part  of  Grant's  scheme,  but  in  a  care 
less  and  rather  purposeless  manner.  General  Early, 
detached  by  Lee  to  deal  with  him,  defeated  him ;  out 
manoeuvred  and  defeated  General  Hunter,  who  was  sent 
to  supersede  him ;  overwhelmed  with  superior  force 
General  Lew  Wallace,  who  stood  in  his  way  further  on ; 
and  upon  July  II  appeared  before  Washington  itself. 
The  threat  to  Washington  had  been  meant  as  no  more 
than  a  threat,  but  the  garrison  was  largely  made  up  of 
recruits  ;  reinforcements  to  it  sent  back  by  Grant  arrived 
only  on  the  same  day  as  Early,  and  if  that  enterprising 
general  had  not  wasted  some  previous  days  there  might 
have  been  a  chance  that  he  could  get  into  Washington, 
though  not  that  he  could  hold  it.  As  it  was  he  attacked 
one  of  the  Washington  forts.  Lincoln  was  present, 
exhibiting,  till  the  officers  there  insisted  on  his  retiring, 
the  indifference  to  personal  danger  which  he  showed  on 
other  occasions  too.  The  attack  was  soon  given  up,  and 
in  a  few  days  Early  had  escaped  back  across  the  Potomac, 
leaving  in  Grant's  mind  a  determination  that  the 
Shenandoah  Valley  should  cease  to  be  so  useful  to  the 
South. 

Sherman  set  out  from  Chattanooga  on  the  day  when 
Grant  crossed  the  Rapidan.  Joseph  Johnston  barred 
his  way  in  one  entrenched  position  after  another. 
Sherman,  with  greater  caution  than  Grant,  or  perhaps 
with  greater  facilities  of  ground,  manoeuvred  him  out  of 
each  position  in  turn,  pushing  him  slowly  back  along  the 
line  of  the  railway  towards  Atlanta,  the  great  manu 
facturing  centre  of  Georgia,  one  hundred  and  twenty 
miles  south  by  east  from  Chattanooga.  Only  once, 
towards  the  end  of  June  at  Kenesaw  Mountain,  some 
twenty  miles  north  of  Atlanta,  did  he  attack  Johnston's 
entrenchments,  causing  himself  some  unnecessary  loss 
and  failing  in  his  direct  attack  on  them,  but  probably 


392  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

thinking  it  necessary  to  show  that  he  would  attack 
whenever  needed.  Johnston  has  left  a  name  as  a 
master  of  defensive  warfare,  and  doubtless  delayed  and 
hampered  Sherman  as  much  as  he  could.  Jefferson 
Davis  angrily  and  unwisely  sent  General  Hood  to 
supersede  him.  This  less  prudent  officer  gave  battle 
several  times,  bringing  up  the  Confederate  loss  before 
Atlanta  fell  to  34,000  against  30,000  on  the  other  side, 
and  being,  by  great  skill  on  Sherman's  part,  compelled 
to  evacuate  Atlanta  on  September  2. 

By  this  time  there  had  occurred  the  last  and  most 
brilliant  exploit  of  old  Admiral  Farragut,  who  on 
August  5  in  a  naval  engagement  of  extraordinarily 
varied  incident,  had  possessed  himself  of  the  harbour 
of  Mobile,  with  its  forts,  though  the  town  remained 
as  a  stronghold  in  Confederate  hands  and  prevented 
a  junction  with  Sherman  which  would  have  quite  cut 
the  Confederacy  in  two. 

Nearer  Washington,  too,  a  memorable  campaign  was 
in  process.  For  three  weeks  after  Early's  unwelcome 
visit,  military  mismanagement  prevailed  near  Washing 
ton.  Early  was  able  to  turn  on  his  pursuers,  and  a 
further  raid,  this  time  into  Pennsylvania,  took  place. 
Grant  was  too  far  off  to  exercise  control  except  through 
a  sufficiently  able  subordinate,  which  Hunter  was  not. 
Halleck,  as  in  a  former  crisis,  did  not  help  matters. 
Lincoln,  though  at  this  time  he  issued  a  large  new  call 
for  recruits,  was  unwilling  any  longer  to  give  military 
orders.  Just  now  his  political  anxieties  had  reached 
their  height.  His  judgment  was  never  firmer,  but 
friends  thought  his  strength  was  breaking  under  the 
strain.  On  this  and  on  all  grounds  he  was  certainly 
wise  to  decline  direct  interference  in  military  affairs. 
On  August  I  Grant  ordered  General  Philip  H.  Sheridan 
to  the  Shenandoah  on  temporary  duty,  expressing  a  wish 
that  he  should  be  put  "  in  command  of  all  the  troops 
in  the  field,  with  instructions  to  put  himself  south  of  the 
enemy  or  follow  him  to  the  death."  Lincoln  tele 
graphed  to  Grant,  quoting  this  despatch  and  adding, 
"  This  I  think  is  exactly  right ;  but  please  look  over  the 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          393 

despatches  you  may  have  received  from  here  even  since 
you  made  that  order  and  see  if  there  is  any  idea  in  the 
head  of  any  one  here  of  putting  our  army  south  of  the 
enemy  or  following  him  to  the  death  in  any  direction. 
I  repeat  to  you  it  will  neither  be  done  nor  attempted 
unless  you  watch  it  every  day  and  hour  and  force  it." 
Grant  now  came  to  Hunter's  army  and  gently  placed 
Sheridan  in  that  general's  place.  The  operations  of  that 
autumn,  which  established  Sheridan's  fame  and  cul 
minated  in  his  final  defeat  of  Early  at  Cedar  Creek  on 
October  19,  made  him  master  of  all  the  lower  part  of  the 
valley.  Before  he  retired  into  winter  quarters  he  had  so 
laid  waste  the  resources  of  that  unfortunate  district  that 
Richmond  could  no  longer  draw  supplies  from  it,  nor 
could  it  again  support  a  Southern  army  in  a  sally  against 
the  North. 

In  the  month  of  November  Sherman  began  a  new  and 
extraordinary  movement,  of  which  the  conception  was 
all  his  own,  sanctioned  with  reluctance  by  Grant,  and 
viewed  with  anxiety  by  Lincoln  though  he  maintained 
his  absolute  resolve  not  to  interfere.  He  had  fortified 
himself  in  Atlanta,  removing  its  civil  inhabitants,  in  an 
entirely  humane  fashion,  to  places  of  safety,  and  he  had 
secured  a  little  rest  for  his  army.  But  he  lay  far  south 
in  the  heart  of  what  he  called  "  Jeff  Davis's  Empire,"  and 
Hood  could  continually  harass  him  by  attacks  on  his 
communications.  Hood,  now  supervised  by  Beauregard, 
was  gathering  reinforcements,  and  Sherman  learnt  that 
he  contemplated  a  diversion  by  invading  Tennessee. 
Sherman  determined  to  divide  his  forces,  to  send  Thomas 
far  back  into  Tennessee  with  sufficient  men,  as  he  calcu 
lated,  to  defend  it,  and  himself  with  the  rest  of  his  army 
to  set  out  for  the  eastern  sea-coast,  wasting  no  men  on 
the  maintenance  of  his  communications,  but  living  on 
the  country  and  "  making  the  people  of  Georgia  feel  the 
weight  of  the  war."  He  set  out  for  the  East  on  Novem 
ber  15.  Hood,  at  Beauregard's  orders,  shortly  marched 
off  for  the  North,  where  the  cautious  Thomas  awaited 
events  within  the  fortifications  of  Nashville.  At  Frank 
lin,  in  the  heart  of  Tennessee,  about  twenty  miles  south 


394  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

of  Nashville,  Hood's  army  suffered  badly  in  an  attack 
upon  General  Schofield,  whom  Thomas  had  left  to  check 
his  advance  while  further  reinforcements  came  to  Nash 
ville.  Schofield  fell  back  slowly  on  Thomas,  Hood 
rashly  pressing  after  him  with  a  small  but  veteran  army 
now  numbering  44,000.  Grant  and  the  Washington 
authorities  viewed  with  much  concern  an  invasion  which 
Thomas  had  suffered  to  proceed  so  far.  Grant  had  not 
shared  Sherman's  faith  in  Thomas.  He  now  repeatedly 
urged  him  to  act,  but  Thomas  had  his  own  views  and 
obstinately  bided  his  time.  Days  followed  when  frozen 
sleet  made  an  advance  impossible.  Grant  had  already 
sent  Logan  to  supersede  Thomas,  and,  growing  still 
more  anxious,  had  started  to  come  west  himself,  when 
the  news  reached  him  of  a  battle  on  December  15  and  16 
in  which  Thomas  had  fallen  on  Hood,  completely  routing 
him,  taking  on  these  days  and  in  the  pursuit  that 
followed  no  less  than  13,000  prisoners. 

There  was  a  song,  "  As  we  go  marching  through 
Georgia,"  which  was  afterwards  famous,  and  which 
Sherman  could  not  endure.  What  his  men  most  often 
sang,  while  they  actually  were  marching  through 
Georgia,  was  another,  and  of  its  kind  a  great  song : — 

"  John  Brown's  body  lies  mouldering  in  the  dust, 
But  his  soul  goes  marching  on. 
Glory,  glory,  Hallelujah." 

Their  progress  was  of  the  nature  of  a  frolic,  though  in 
one  way  a  very  stern  frolic.  They  had  little  trouble 
from  the  small  and  scattered  Confederate  forces  that 
lay  near  their  route.  They  industriously  and  ingeniously 
destroyed  the  railway  track  of  the  South,  heating  the 
rails  and  twisting  them  into  knots ;  and  the  rich  country 
of  Georgia,  which  had  become  the  chief  granary  of  the 
Confederates,  was  devastated  as  they  passed,  for  a  space 
fifty  or  sixty  miles  broad,  by  the  destruction  of  all 
the  produce  they  could  not  consume.  This  was  done 
under  control  by  organised  forage  parties.  Reasonable 
measures  were  taken  to  prevent  private  pillage  of  houses. 
No  doubt  it  happened.  Sherman's  able  cavalry  com- 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY  395 

mander  earned  a  bad  name,  and  "  Uncle  Billy,"  as  they 
called  him  to  his  face,  clearly  had  a  soft  corner  in  his 
heart  for  the  light-hearted  and  light-fingered  gentlemen 
called  "  bummers  "  (a  "  bummer,"  says  the  Oxford 
Dictionary,  "is  one  who  quits  the  ranks  and  goes  on  an 
independent  foraging  expedition  on  his  own  account  "). 
They  were,  incidentally,  Sherman  found,  good  scouts. 
But  the  serious  crimes  committed  were  very  few,  judged 
by  the  standard  of  the  ordinary  civil  population.  The 
authentic  complaints  recorded  relate  to  such  matters  as 
the  smashing  of  a  grand  piano  or  the  disappearance  of 
some  fine  old  Madeira.  Thus  the  suffering  caused  to 
individuals  was  probably  not  extreme,  and  a  long 
continuance  of  the  war  was  rendered  almost  impossible. 
A  little  before  Christmas  Day,  1864,  Sherman  had 
captured,  with  slight  opposition,  the  city  of  Savannah, 
on  the  Atlantic,  with  many  guns  and  other  spoils,  and  was 
soon  ready  to  turn  northwards  on  the  last  lap  of  his 
triumphant  course.  Lincoln's  letter  of  thanks  charac 
teristically  confessed  his  earlier  unexpressed  and 
unfulfilled  fears. 

Grant  was  proceeding  all  the  time  with  his  pressure  on 
the  single  large  fortress  which  Richmond  and  Petersburg 
together  constituted.  Its  circuit  was  far  too  great  for 
complete  investment.  His  efforts  were  for  a  time 
directed  to  seizing  the  three  railway  lines  which  con 
verged  from  the  south  on  Petersburg  and  to  that  extent 
cutting  off  the  supplies  of  the  enemy.  But  he  failed 
to  get  hold  of  the  most  important  of  these  railways.  He 
settled  down  to  the  slow  process  of  entrenching  his  own 
lines  securely  and  extending  the  entrenchment  further 
and  further  round  the  south  side  of  Petersburg.  Lee 
was  thus  being  forced  to  extend  the  position  held  by 
his  own  small  army  further  and  further.  In  time  the 
lines  would  crack  and  the  end  come. 

It  need  hardly  be  said  that  despair  was  invading  the 
remnant  of  the  Confederacy ;  supplies  began  to  run 
short  in  Richmond,  recruiting  had  ceased,  desertion  was 
increasing.  Before  the  story  of  its  long  resistance 
closes  it  is  better  to  face  the  gravest  charge  against  the 


396  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

South.  That  charge  relates  to  the  misery  inflicted  upon 
many  thousands  of  Northern  prisoners  in  certain  prisons 
or  detention  camps  of  the  South.  The  alleged  horrors 
were  real  and  were  great.  The  details  should  not  be 
commemorated,  but  it  is  right  to  observe  that  the 
pitiable  condition  in  which  the  stricken  survivors  of  this 
captivity  returned,  and  the  tale  they  had  to  tell,  caused 
the  bitterness  which  might  be  noted  afterwards  in  some 
Northerners.  The  guilt  lay  mainly  with  a  few  subordi 
nate  but  uncontrolled  officials.  In  some  degree  it  must 
have  been  shared  by  Jefferson  Davis  and  his  Administra 
tion,  though  a  large  allowance  should  be  made  for  men 
so  sorely  driven.  But  it  affords  no  ground  whatever,  as 
more  fortunate  prisoners  taken  by  the  Confederates 
have  sometimes  testified,  for  any  general  imputation  of 
cruelty  against  the  Southern  officers,  soldiers,  or  people. 
There  is  nothing  in  the  record  of  the  war  which  dis 
honours  the  South,  nothing  to  restrain  the  tribute  to  its 
heroism  which  is  due  from  a  foreign  writer,  and  which  is 
irrepressible  in  the  case  of  a  writer  who  rejoices  that  the 
Confederacy  failed. 

4.  The  Second  Election  of  Lincoln  :   1864. 

Having  the  general  for  whom  he  had  long  sought, 
Lincoln  could  now  be  in  military  matters  little  more  than 
the  most  intelligent  onlooker  ;  he  could  maintain  the 
.  attitude,  congenial  to  him  where  he  dealt  with  skilled 
men,  that  when  he  differed  from  them  they  probably 
knew  better  than  he.  This  was  well,  for  in  1864  his 
political  anxieties  became  greater  than  they  had  been 
since  war  declared  itself  at  Fort  Sumter.  Whole  States 
which  had  belonged  to  the  Confederacy  were  now  securely 
held  by  the  Union  armies,  and  the  difficult  problem  of 
their  government  was  approaching  its  final  settlement. 
It  seemed  that  the  war  should  soon  end  ;  so  the  question 
of  peace  was  pressed  urgently.  Moreover,  the  election 
of  a  President  was  due  in  the  autumn,  and,  strange  as  it 
is,  the  issue  was  to  be  whether,  with  victory  in  their  grasp, 
the  victors  should  themselves  surrender. 

It  was  not  given  to  Lincoln  after  all  to  play  a  great 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          397 

part  in  the  reconstruction  of  the  South ;  that  was 
reserved  for  much  rougher  and  much  weaker  hands. 
But  the  lines  on  which  he  had  moved  from  the  first  are 
of  interest.  West  Virginia,  with  its  solid  Unionist 
population,  was  simply  allowed  to  form  itself  into  an 
ordinary  new  State.  But  matters  were  not  so  simple 
where  the  Northern  occupation  was  insecure,  or  where 
a  tiny  fraction  of  a  State  was  held,  or  where  a  large  part 
of  the  people  leaned  to  the  Confederacy.  Military 
governors  were  of  course  appointed  ;  in  Tennessee  this 
position  was  given  to  a  strong  Unionist,  Andrew  Johnson, 
who  was  already  Senator  for  that  State.  In  Louisiana 
and  elsewhere  Lincoln  encouraged  the  citizens  who  would 
unreservedly  accept  the  Union  to  organise  State  Govern 
ments  for  themselves.  Where  they  did  so  there  was 
friction  between  them  and  the  Northern  military 
governor  who  was  still  indispensable.  There  was  also  to 
the  end  triangular  trouble  between  the  factions  in 
Missouri  and  the  general  commanding  there.  To  these 
little  difficulties,  which  were  of  course  unceasing,  Lincoln 
applied  the  firmness  and  tact  which  were  no  longer  sur 
prising  in  him,  with  a  pleasing  mixture  of  good  temper 
and  healthy  irritation.  But  further  difficulties  lay  in 
the  attitude  of  Congress,  which  was  concerned  in  the 
matter  because  each  House  could  admit  or  reject  the 
Senators  or  Representatives  claiming  to  sit  for  a  Southern 
State.  There  were  questions  about  slavery  in  such  States. 
Lincoln,  as  we  have  seen,  had  desired,  if  he  could,  to 
bring  about  the  abolition  of  slavery  through  gradual  and 
through  local  action,  and  he  had  wished  to  see  the 
franchise  given  only  to  the  few  educated  negroes. 
Nothing  came  of  this,  but  it  kept  up  the  suspicion  of 
Radicals  in  Congress  that  he  was  not  sound  on  slavery  ; 
and,  apart  from  slavery,  the  whole  question  of  the  terms 
on  which  people  lately  in  arms  against  the  country  could 
be  admitted  as  participators  in  the  government  of  the 
country  was  one  on  which  statesmen  in  Congress  had 
their  own  very  important  point  of  view.  Lincoln's  main 
wish  was  that,  with  the  greatest  speed  and  the  least  heat 
spent  on  avoidable  controversy  State  government  of 


398  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

spontaneous  local  growth  should  spring  up  in  the 
reconquered  South.  "  In  all  available  ways,"  he  had 
written  to  one  of  his  military  governors,  "give  the  people  a 
chance  to  express  their  wishes  at  these  elections.  Follow 
forms  of  law  as  far  as  convenient,  but  at  all  events  get 
the  expression  of  the  largest  number  of  people  possible." 
Above  all  he  was  afraid  lest  in  the  Southern  elections  to 
Congress  that  very  thing  should  happen  which  after  his 
death  did  happen.  "  To  send  a  parcel  of  Northern  men 
here  as  representatives,  elected,  as  would  be  understood 
(and  perhaps  really  so),  at  the  point  of  the  bayonet,  would 
be  disgraceful  and  outrageous."  For  a  time  he  and 
Congress  worked  together  well  enough,  but  sharp  dis 
agreement  arose  in  1864.  He  had  propounded  a 
particular  plan  for  the  reconstruction  of  Southern  States. 
Senator  Wade,  the  formidable  Chairman  of  the  Joint 
Committee  on  the  War,  and  Henry  'Winter  Davis,  a 
keen,  acrid,  and  fluent  man  who  was  powerful  with  the 
House,  carried  a  Bill  under  which  a  State  could  only  be 
reconstructed  on  their  own  plan,  which  differed  from 
Lincoln's.  The  Bill  came  to  Lincoln  for  signature  in 
the  last  hours  of  the  session,  and,  amidst  frightened 
protests  from  friendly  legislators  then  in  his  room,  he  let 
it  lie  there  unsigned,  till  it  expired  with  the  session,  and 
went  on  with  his  work.  This  was  in  July,  1864;  his 
re-election  was  at  stake.  The  Democrats  were  gaining 
ground  ;  he  might  be  giving  extreme  offence  to  the 
strongest  Republican.  "  If  they  choose,"  he  said,  "  to 
make  a  point  of  this  I  do  not  doubt  that  they  can  do 
harm  "  (indeed,  those  powerful  men  Wade  and  Davis 
now  declared  against  his  re-election  with  ability  and 
extraordinary  bitterness)  ;  but  he  continued  :  "At  all 
events  I  must  keep  some  consciousness  of  being  some 
where  near  right.  I  must  keep  some  standard  or 
principle  fixed  within  myself."  The  Bill  would  have 
repressed  loyal  efforts  already  made  to  establish  State 
Governments  in  the  South.  It  contained  also  a  pro 
vision  imposing  the  abolition  of  slavery  on  every  such 
reconstructed  State.  This  was  an  attempt  to  remedy 
any  flaw  in  the  constitutional  effect  of  the  Proclamation 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          399 

of  Emancipation.  But  it  was  certainly  in  itself  flagrantly 
unconstitutional ;  and  the  only  conclusive  way  of 
abolishing  slavery  was  the  Constitutional  Amendment, 
for  which  Lincoln  was  now  anxious.  This  was  not  a 
pedantic  point,  for  there  might  have  been  great  trouble 
if  the  courts  had  later  found  a  constitutional  flaw  in 
some  negro's  title  to  freedom.  But  the  correctness  of 
Lincoln's  view  hardly  matters.  In  lots  of  little  things, 
like  a  tired  man  who  was  careless  by  nature,  Lincoln  may 
perhaps  have  yielded  to  influence  or  acted  for  his  political 
convenience  in  ways  which  may  justly  be  censured,  but 
it  would  be  merely  immoral  to  care  whether  he  did  so  or 
did  not,  since  at  the  crisis  of  his  fate  he  could  risk  all  for 
one  scruple.  In  an  earlier  stage  of  his  controversies 
with  the  parties  he  had  written  :  "  From  time  to  time  I 
have  done  and  said  what  appeared  to  me  proper  to  do  and 
say.  The  public  "knows  it  all.  It  obliges  nobody  to 
follow  me,  and  I  trust  it  obliges  me  to  follow  nobody. 
The  Radicals  and  Conservatives  each  agree  with  me  in 
some  things  and  disagree  in  others.  I  could  wish  both 
to  agree  with  me  in  all  things  ;  for  then  they  would 
agree  with  each  other,  and  be  too  strong  for  any  foe 
from  any  quarter.  They,  however,  choose  to  do  other 
wise,  and  I  do  not  question  their  right.  I,  too,  shall  do 
what  seems  to  be  my  duty.  I  hold  whoever  commands 
in  Missouri  or  elsewhere  responsible  to  me  and  not  to 
either  Radicals  or  Conservatives.  It  is  my  duty  to 
hear  all ;  but  at  last  I  must,  within  my  sphere,  judge 
what  to  do  and  what  to  forbear." 

In  this  same  month  of  July,  after  the  Confederate 
General  Early's  appearance  before  Washington  had  given 
Lincoln  a  pause  from  political  cares,  another  trouble 
reached  a  point  at  which  it  is  known  to  have  tried  his 
patience  more  than  any  other  trouble  of  his  Presidency. 
Peace  after  war  is  not  always  a  matter  of  substituting 
the  diplomatist  for  the  soldier.  When  two  sides  were 
fighting,  one  for  Union  and  the  other  for  Independence, 
one  or  the  other  had  to  surrender  the  whole  point  at 
issue.  In  this  case  there  might  appear  to  have  been  a 
third  possibility.  The  Southern  States  might  have  been 


400  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

invited  to  return  to  the  Union  on  terms  which  admitted 
their  right  to  secede  again  if  they  felt  aggrieved.  The 
invitation  would  in  fact  have  been  refused.  But,  if  it  had 
been  made  and  accepted,  this  would  have  been  a  worse 
surrender  for  the  North  than  any  mere  acknowledgment 
that  the  South  could  not  be  reconquered  ;  for  national 
unity  from  that  day  to  this  would  have  existed  on  the 
sufferance  of  a  factious  or  a  foreign  majority  in  any 
single  State.  Lincoln  had  faced  this.  He  was  there  to 
restore  the  Union  on  a  firm  foundation.  He  meant  to 
insist  to  the  point  of  pedantry  that,  by  not  so  much  as  a 
word  or  line  from  the  President  or  anyone  seeming  to 
act  for  him,  should  the  lawful  right  of  secession  even 
appear  to  be  acknowledged.  Some  men  would  have 
been  glad  to  hang  Jefferson  Davis  as  a  traitor,  yet 
would  have  been  ready  to  negotiate  with  him  as  with  a 
foreign  king.  Lincoln,  who  would  not  have  hurt  one 
hair  of  his  head,  and  would  have  talked  things  over  with 
Mr.  Davis  quite  pleasantly,  would  have  died  rather  than 
treat  with  him  on  the  footing  that  he  was  head  of  an 
independent  Confederacy.  The  blood  shed  might  have 
been  shed  for  nothing  if  he  had  done  so.  But  to  many 
men,  in  the  long  agony  of  the  war  and  its  disappoint 
ments,  the  plain  position  became  much  obscured.  The 
idea  in  various  forms  that  by  some  sort  of  negotia 
tion  the  issue  could  be  evaded  began  to  assert  itself 
again  and  again.  The  delusion  was  freely  propagated 
that  the  South  was  ready  to  give  in  if  only  Lincoln 
would  encourage  its  approaches.  It  was  sheer  delusion. 
Jefferson  Davis  said  frankly  to  the  last  that  the  Con 
federacy  would  have  "  independence  or  extermination," 
and  though  Stephens  and  many  others  spoke  of  peace  to 
the  electors  in  their  own  States,  Jefferson  Davis  had  his 
army  with  him,  and  the  only  result  which  agitation 
against  him  ever  produced  was  that  two  months  before 
the  irreparable  collapse  the  chief  command  under  him 
was  given  to  his  most  faithful  servant  Lee.  But  it  was 
useless  for  Lincoln  to  expose  the  delusion  in  the  plainest 
terms  ;  it  survived  exposure  and  became  a  danger  to 
Northern  unity. 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY 


401 


Lincoln  therefore  took  a  strange  course,  which 
generally  succeeded.  '  When  honest  men  came  to  him 
and  said  that  the  South  could  be  induced  to  yield,  he 
proposed  to  them  that  they  should  go  to  Jefferson  Davis 
and  see  for  themselves.  The  Chairman  of  the  Republican 
organisation  ultimately  approached  .Lincoln  on  this 
matter  at  the  request  of  a  strong  committee  ;  but  he  was 
a  sensible  man  whom  Lincoln  at  once  converted  by 
drafting  the  precise  message  that  would  have  to  be  sent 
to  the  Confederate  President.  On  two  earlier  occasions 
such  labourers  for  peace  were  allowed  to  go  across  the 
lines  and  talk  with  Davis  ;  it  could  be  trusted  to  their 
honour  to  pretend  to  no  authority  ;  they  had  interesting 
talks  with  the  great  enemy,  and  made  religious  appeals 
to  him  or  entertained  him  with  wild  proposals  for  a  joint 
war  on  France  over  Mexico.  They  returned,  converted 
also.  But  in  July  Horace  Greeley,  the  great  editor,  who 
was  too  opinionated  to  be  quite  honest,  was  somehow 
convinced  that  Southern  agents  at  Niagara,  who  had 
really  come  to  hold  intercourse  with  the  disloyal  group 
among  the  Democrats,  were  "  two  ambassadors  "  from 
the  Confederacy  seeking  an  audience  of  Lincoln.  He 
wrote  to  Lincoln,  begging  him  to  receive  them.  Lincoln 
caused  Greeley  to  go  to  Niagara  and  see  the  supposed 
ambassadors  himself.  He  gave  him  written  authority 
to  bring  to  him  any  person  with  proper  credentials,  pro 
vided,  as  he  made  plain  in  terms  that  perhaps  were  blunt, 
that  the  basis  of  any  negotiation  should  include  the 
recognition  of  the  Union  and  the  abolition  of  slavery. 
The  persons  whom  Greeley  saw  had  no  authority  to  treat 
about  anything.  Greeley  in  his  irritation  now  urged 
Lincoln  to  convey  to  Jefferson  Davis  through  these 
mysterious  men  his  readiness  to  receive  them  if  they 
were  accredited.  In  other  words,  the  North  was  to 
begin  suing  for  peace — a  thing  clearly  unwise,  which 
Lincoln  refused.  Greeley  now  involved  Lincoln  in  a 
tangled  controversy  to  which  he  gave  such  a  turn  that, 
unless  Lincoln  would  publish  the  most  passionately 
pacific  of  Greeley's  letters,  to  the  great  discouragement 
of  the  public  with  whom  Greeley  counted,  he  must 


402  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

himself  keep  silent  on  what  had  passed.  He  elected  to 
keep  silent  while  Greeley  in  his  paper  criticised  him 
as  the  person  responsible  for  the  continuance  of  senseless 
bloodshed.  This  was  publicly  harmful ;  and,  as  for  its 
private  bearing,  the  reputation  of  obstinate  blood- 
thirstiness  was  certain  to  be  painful  to  Lincoln. 

The  history  of  Lincoln's  Cabinet  has  a  bearing  upon 
what  is  to  follow.  He  ruled  his  Ministers  with  undisputed 
authority,  talked  with  them  collectivelynrpon  the  easiest 
terms,  spoke  to  them  as  a  headmaster  to  his  school  when 
they  caballed  against  one  another,  kept  them  in  some 
sort  of  unison  in  a  manner  which  astonished  all  who  knew 
them.  Cameron  had  had  to  retire  early  ;  so  did  the  little- 
known  Caleb  Smith,  who  was  succeeded  in  his  unimpor 
tant  office  as  Secretary  of  the  Interior  by  a  Mr.  Usher, 
who  seems  to  have  been  well  chosen.  Bates,  the 
Attorney-General,  retired,  weary  of  his  work,  towards 
the  end  of  1864,  and  Lincoln  had  the  keen  pleasure  of 
appointing  James  Speed,  the  brother  of  that  unfor- 
gotten  and  greatly  honoured  friend  whom  he  honoured 
the  more  for  his  conteiitedness  with  private  station. 
James  Speed  himself  was  in  Lincoln's  opinion  "  an 
honest  man  and  a  gentleman,  and  one  of  those  well- 
poised  men,  not  too  common  here,  who  are  not  spoiled 
by  a  big  office." 

Blair  might  be  regarded  as  a  delightful,  or  equally  as 
an  intolerable  man.  He  attacked  all' manner  of  people 
causelessly  and  violently,  and  earned  implacable  dislike 
from  the  Radicals  in  his  party.  Then  he  frankly  asked 
Lincoln  to  dismiss  him  whenever  it  was  convenient. 
There  came  a  time  when  Lincoln's  re-election  was  in 
great  peril,  and  he  might,  it  was  urged,  have  made  it 
sure  by  dismissing  Blair.  It  is  significant  that  Lincoln 
then  refused  to  promote  his  own  cause  by  seeming  to 
sacrifice  Blair,  but  later  on,  when  his  own  election  was 
fairly  certain,  but  a  greater  degree  of  unity  in  the 
Republican  party  was  to  be  gained,  did  ask  Blair  to  go  ; 
(Blair's  quarrels,  it  should  be  added,  had  become  more 
and  more  outrageous).  So  he  went  and  immediately 
flung  himself  with  enthusiasm  into  the  advocacy  of 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          403 

Lincoln's  cause.  All  the  men  who  left  Lincoln  remained 
his  friends,  except  one  who  will  shortly  concern  us.  Of 
Lincoln's  more  important  ministers  Welles  did  his  work 
for  the  Navy  industriously  but  unnoted.  Stanton,  on 
the  other  hand,  and  Lincoln's  relations  with  Stanton  are 
the  subjects  of  many  pages  of  literature.  These  two 
curious  and  seemingly  incompatible  men  hit  upon 
extraordinary  methods  of  working  together.  It  can  be 
seen  that  Lincoln's  chief  care  in  dealing  with  his  subordi 
nates  was  to  give  support  and  to  give  free  play  to  any 
man  whose  heart  was  in  his  work.  In  countless  small 
matters  he  would  let  Stanton  disobey  him  and  flout  him 
openly.  ("  Did  Stanton  tell  you  I  was  a  damned  fool  ? 
Then  I  expect  I  must  be  one,  for  he  is  almost  always  right 
and  generally  says  what  he  means.")  But  every  now  and 
then,  when  he  cared  much  about  his  own  wish,  he  would 
step  in  and  crush  Stanton  flat.  Crowds  of  applicants  to 
Lincoln  with  requests  of  a  kind  that  must  be  granted 
sparingly  were  passed  on  to  Stanton,  pleased  with  the 
President,  or  mystified  by  his  sadly  observing  that  he  had 
not  much  influence  with  this  Administration  but  hoped 
to  have  more  with  the  next.  Stanton  always  refused 
them.  He  enjoyed  doing  it.  Yet  it  seems  a  low  trick 
to  have  thus  indulged  his  taste  for  unpopularity,  till  one 
discovers  that,  when  Stanton  might  have  been  blamed 
seriously  and  unfairly,  Lincoln  was  very  careful  to 
shoulder  the  blame  himself.  The  gist  of  their  mutual 
dealings  was  that  the  hated  Stanton  received  a  thinly 
disguised,  but  quite  unfailing  support,  and  that  hated  or 
applauded,  ill  or  well,  wrong  in  this  detail  and  right  in 
that,  he  abode  in  his  department  and  drove,  and  drove, 
and  drove,  and  worshipped  Lincoln.  To  Seward,  who 
played  first  and  last  a  notable  part  in  history,  and  who 
all  this  time  conducted  foreign  affairs  under  Lincoln 
without  any  mishap  in  the  end,  one  tribute  is  due. 
When  he  had  not  a  master  it  is  said  that  his  abilities 
were  made  useless  by  his  egotism  ;  yet  it  can  be  seen 
that,  with  his  especial  cause  to  be  jealous  of  Lincoln,  he 
could  not  even  conceive  how  men  let  private  jealousy 
divide  them  in  the  performance  of  duty. 


404  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

It  was  otherwise  with  the  ablest  man  in  the  Cabinet. 
Salmon  P.  Chase  must  really  have  been  a  good  man  in  the 
days  before  he  fell  in  love  with  his  own  goodness. 
Lincoln  and  the  country  had  confidence  in  his  manage 
ment  of  the  Treasury,  and  Lincoln  thought  more  highly 
of  his  general  ability  than  of  that  of  any  other  man  about 
him.  He,  for  his  part,  distrusted  and  despised  Lincoln. 
Those  who  read  Lincoln's  important  letters  and  speeches 
see  in  him  at  once  a  great  gentleman  ;  there  were  but 
few  among  the  really  well-educated  men  of  America  who 
made  much  of  his  lacking  some  of  the  minor  points  of 
gentility  to  which  most  of  them  were  born  ;  but  of  these 
few  Chase  betrayed  himself  as  one.  At  the  beginning  of 
1864  Chase  was  putting  it  about  that  he  had  himself  no 
wish  to  be  President,  but —  ;  that  of  course  he  was  loyal 
to  Mr.  Lincoln,  but —  ;  and  so  forth.  He  had,  as  indeed 
he  deserved,  admirers  who  wished  he  should  be  President, 
and  early  in  the  year  some  of  them  expressed  this  wish 
in  a  manifesto.  Chase  wrote  to  Lincoln  that  this  was 
not  his  own  doing  ;  Lincoln  replied  that  he  himself  knew 
as  little  of  these  things  "  as  my  friends  will  allow  me  to 
know."  To  those  who  spoke  to  him  of  Chase's  intrigues 
he  only  said  that  Chase  would  in  some  ways  make  a  very 
good  President,  and  he  hoped  they  would  never  have  a 
worse  President  than  he.  The  movement  in  favour  of 
Chase  collapsed  very  soon,  and  it  evidently  had  no 
effect  on  Lincoln.  Chase,  however,  was  beginning  to 
foster  grievances  of  his  own  against  Lincoln.  These 
related  always  to  appointments  in  the  service  of  tne 
Treasury.  He  professed  a  horror  of  party  influences  in 
appointments,  and  imputed  corrupt  motives  to  Lincoln 
in  such  matters.  He  shared  the  sound  ideas  of  the  later 
civil  service  reformers,  though  he  was  far  too  easily 
managed  by  a  low  class  of  flatterers  to  have  been  of  the 
least  use  in  carrying  them  out.  Lincoln  would  certainly 
not  at  that  crisis  have  permitted  strife  over  civil  service 
reform,  but  some  of  his  admirers  have  probably  gone 
too  far  in  claiming  him  as  a  sturdy  supporter  of  the  old 
school  who  would  despise  the  reforming  idea.  Letters 
of  his  much  earlier  betray  his  doubts  as  to  the  old 


THE  APPROACH   OF  VICTORY          405 

system,  and  he  was  exactly  the  man  who  in  quieter  times 
could  have  improved  matters  with  the  least  possible 
fuss.  However  that  may  be,  all  the  tiresome  circum 
stances  of  Chase's  differences  with  him  are  well  known, 
and  in  these  instances  Lincoln  was  clearly  in  the  right, 
and  Chase  quarrelled  only  because  he  could  not  force 
upon  him  appointments  that  would  have  created  fury. 
Once  Chase  was  overruled  and  wrote  his  resignation. 
Lincoln  went  to  him  with  the  resignation  in  his  hand, 
treated  him  with  simple  affection  for  a  man  whom  he  still 
liked,  and  made  him  take  it  back.  Later  on  Chase  got 
his  own  way  on  the  whole,  but  was  angry  and  sent 
another  resignation.  Someone  heard  of  it  and  came  to 
Lincoln  to  say  that  the  loss  of  Chase  would  cause  a 
financial  panic.  Lincoln's  answer  was  to  this  effect : 
"  Chase  thinks  he  has  become  indispensable  to  the 
country  ;  that  his  intimate  friends  know  it,  and  he 
cannot  comprehend  why  the  country  does  not  under 
stand  it.  He  also  thinks  he  ought  to  be  President ;  has 
no  doubt  whatever  about  that.  It  is  inconceivable  to 
dim  why  people  do  not  rise  as  one  man  and  say  so.  He 
is  a  great  statesman,  and  at  the  bottom  a  patriot. 
Ordinarily  he  discharges  the  duties  of  a  public  office 
with  greater  ability  than  any  man  I  know.  Mind,  I  say 
ordinarily,'  but  he  has  become  irritable,  uncomfortable, 
so  that  he  is  never  perfectly  happy  unless  he  is  thoroughly 
miserable  and  able  to  make  everybody  else  just  as 
uncomfortable  as  he  is  himself.  He  is  either  determined 
to  annoy  me,  or  that  I  shall  pat  him  on  the  shoulder  and 
coax  him  to  stay.  I  don't  think  I  ought  to  do  it.  I  will 
not  do  it.  I  will  take  him  at  his  word."  So  he  did. 
This  was  at  the  end  of  June,  1864,  when  Lincoln's 
apprehensions  about  his  own  re-election  were  keen,  and 
the  resignation  of  Chase,  along  with  the  retention  of 
Blair,  seemed  likely  to  provoke  anger  which  was  very 
dangerous  to  himself.  An  excellent  successor  to  the 
ndispensable  man  was  soon  found.  Chase  found  more 
satisfaction  than  ever  in  insidious  opposition  to  Lincoln. 
Lincoln's  opportunity  of  requiting  him  was  not  yet. 
The  question  of  the  Presidency  loomed  large  from  the 


406  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

beginning  of  the  year  to  the  election  in  November.  At 
first,  while  the  affairs  of  war  seemed  to  be  in  good  train, 
the  chief  question  was  who  should  be  the  Republican 
candidate.  It  was-obviously  not  a  time  when  a  President: 
of  even  moderate  ability  and  character,  with  all  the 
threads  in  his  hands,  could  wisely  have  been  replaced 
except  for  overwhelming  reasons.  But  since  1832, 
when  Jackson  had  been  re-elected,  the  practice  of  giving 
a  President  a  second  term  had  lapsed.  It  has  been  seen, 
that  there  was  friction,  not  wholly  unnatural,  between! 
Lincoln  and  many  of  his  party.  The  inner  circles  of 
politicians  were  considering  what  candidate  could  carry 
the  country.  They  were  doing  so  with  great  anxiety,  for 
disaffection  was  growing,  serious  in  the  North  and  the 
Democrats  would  make  a  good  fight.  They  honestly 
doubted  whether  Lincoln  was  the  best  candidate,  and 
attributed  their  own  excited  mood  of  criticism  to  the 
public  at  large.  They  forgot  the  leaning  of  ordinary  men 
towards  one  who  is  already  serving  them  honestly.  Of 
the  other  possible  candidates,  including  Chase,  Fremont 
had  the  most  energetic  backers.  Enough  has  been  said 
already  of  his  delusive  attractiveness.  General  Butler 
had  also  some  support.  He  was  an  impostor  of  a  coarser 
but  more  useful  stamp.  A  successful  advocate  in 
Massachusetts,  he  had  commanded  the  militia  of  the 
State  when  they  first  appeared  on  the  scene  at  Baltimore 
in  1861,  and  he  had  been  in  evidence  ever  since  without 
sufficient  opportunity  till  May,  1864,  of  proving  that 
real  military  incapacity  of  which  some  of  Lincoln's  friends 
suspected  him.  He  had  a  kind  of  resourceful  impudence, 
coupled  with  executive  vigour  and  a  good  deal  of  wit, 
which  had  made  him  useful  in  the  less  martial  duties  of 
his  command.  Generals  in  a  war  of  this  character  were 
often  so  placed  that  they  had  little  fighting  to  do  and 
much  civil  government,  and  Butler,  who  had  first 
treated  slaves  as  "  contraband  "  and  had  dealt  with  his 
difficulties  about  negroes  with  more  heart  and  more 
sense  than  many  generals,  had  to  some  extent  earned  his 
reputation  among  the  Republicans.  Thus  of  those 
volunteer  generals  who  never  became  good  soldiers  he  is 


THE  APPROACH  OF   VICTORY          407 

said  to  have  been  the  only  one  that  escaped  the  constant 
process  of  weeding  out.  To  the  end  he  kept  confidently 
claiming  higher  rank  in  the  Army,  and  when  he  had 
signally  failed  under  Grant  at  Petersburg  he  succeeded 
somehow  in  imposing  himself  upon  that,  at  first  indignant, 
general.  Nothing  actually  came  of  the  danger  that  the 
public  might  find  a  hero  in  this  man,  who  was  neither 
scrupulous  nor  able,  but  he  had  so  captivated  experienced 
politicians  that  some  continued  even  after  Lincoln's 
re-election  to  think  Butler  the  man  whom  the  people 
would  have  preferred.  Last  but  not  least  many  were 
anxious  to  nominate  Grant.  It  was  an  innocent  thought, 
but  Grant's  merits  were  themselves  the  conclusive  reason 
why  he  should  not  be  taken  from  the  work  he  had  already 
in  hand. 

Through  the  early  months  of  the  year  the  active 
politicians  earnestly  collogued  among  themselves  about 
possible  candidates,  and  it  seems  there  was  little  sign 
among  them  of  that  general  confidence  in  Lincoln  which 
a  little  while  before  had  been  recognised  as  prevailing 
in  the  country.  In  May  the  small  and  light-headed 
section  of  the  so-called  Radicals  who  favoured  Fremont 
organised  for  themselves  a  "  national  meeting  "  of  some 
few  people  at  which  they  nominated  him  for  the  Presi 
dency.  They  had  no  chance  of  success,  but  they  might 
have  helped  the  Democrats  by  carrying  off  some 
Republican  votes.  Besides,  there  are  of  course  men  who, 
having  started  as  extremists  in  one  direction  and  failed, 
will  go  over  to  the  opposite  extreme  rather  than  moderate 
their  aims.  Months  later,  when  a  Republican  victory 
of  some  sort  became  certain,  unanimity  among  Republi 
cans  was  secured  ;  for  some  passions  were  appeased  by 
the  resignation  of  Blair,  and  Fremont  was  prevailed  upon 
to  withdraw.  But  in  the  meantime  the  Republican 
party  had  sent  its  delegates  to  a  Convention  at  Baltimore 
early  in  June.  This  Convention  met  in  a  comparatively 
fortunate  hour.  In  spite  of  the  open  disaffection  of  small 
sections,  the  Northern  people  had  been  in  good  spirits 
about  the  war  when  Grant  set  out  to  overcome  Lee.  At 
first  he  was  felt  to  be  progressing  pretty  well,  and,  though 


4o8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

the  reverse  at  Cold  Harbour  had  happened  a  few  days 
before,  the  size  of  that  mishap  was  not  yet  appreciated. 
Ordinary  citizens,  called  upon  now  and  then  to  decide  a 
broad  and  grave  issue,  often  judge  with  greater  calm 
than  is  possible  to  any  but  the  best  of  the  politicians 
and  the  journalists.  Indeed,  some  serious  politicians 
had  been  anxious  to  postpone  the  Convention,  justly 
fearing  that  these  ignorant  delegates  were  not  yet 
imbued  with  that  contempt  for  Lincoln  which  they  had 
worked  up  among  themselves.  At  the  Baltimore  Con 
vention  the  delegates  of  one  State  wanted  Grant,  but 
the  nomination  of  Lincoln  was  immediate  and  almost 
unanimous.  This  same  Convention  declared  for  a 
Constitutional  Amendment  to  abolish  slavery.  Lincoln 
would  say  nothing  as  to  the  choice  of  a  candidate  for 
the  Vice-Presidency.  He  was  right,  but  the  result  was 
most  unhappy  in  the  end.  The  Convention  chose 
Andrew  Johnson.  Johnson,  whom  Lincoln  could  hardly 
endure,  began  life  as  a  journeyman  tailor.  He  had 
raised  himself  like  -  Lincoln,  and  had  performed  a  great 
part  in  rallying  the  Unionists  of  Tennessee.  But — not 
to  dwell  upon  the  fact  that  he  was  drunk  when  he  was 
sworn  in  as  Vice-President — his  political  creed  was  that 
of  bitter  class-hatred,  and  his  character  degenerated  into 
a  weak  and  brutal  obstinacy.  This  man  was  to  succeed 
Lincoln.  Lincoln,  in  his  letter  to  accept  the  nomination, 
wrote  modestly,  refusing  to  take  the  decision  of  the 
Convention  as  a  tribute  to  his  peculiar  fitness  for  his  post, 
but  was  "  reminded  in  this  connection  of  a  story  of  an 
old  Dutch  farmer,  who  remarked  to  a  companion  that  it 
was  not  best  to  swap  horses  when  crossing  a  stream." 

It  remained  possible  that  the  dissatisfied  Republicans 
would  revolt  later  and  put  another  champion  in  the 
field.  But  now  attention  turned  to  the  Democrats. 
Their  Convention  was  to  meet  at  Chicago  at  the  end  of 
August,  and  in  the  interval  the  North  entered  upon  the 
period  of  deepest  mental  depression  that  came  to  it  during 
the  war.  It  is  startling  to  learn  now  that  in  the  course 
of  that  year,  when  the  Confederacy  lay  like  a  nut  in  the 
nutcrackers,  when  the  crushing  of  its  resistance  might 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          409 

,  indeed  require  a  little  stronger  pressure  than  was  expected, 
and  the  first  splitting  in  its  hard  substance  might  not  come 
on  the  side  on  which  it  was  looked  for,  but  when  no  wise 
man  could  have  a  doubt  as  to  the  end,  the  victorious 
people  were  inclined  to  think  that  the  moment  had  come 
for  giving  in.     "  In  this  purpose  to  save  the  country  and 
its  liberties,"  said  Lincoln,  "  no  class  of  people  seem  so 
nearly  unanimous  as  the  soldiers  in  the  field  and  the 
sailors  afloat.     Do  they  not  have  the  hardest  of  it  ? 
Who  should  quail  while  they  do  not  ?  "     Yet  there  is  con 
clusive  authority  for  saying  that  there  was  now  more 
quailing  in  the  North  than  there  had  ever  been  before. 
When  the  war  had  gone  on  long,  checks  to  the  course  of 
victory  shook  the  nerves  of  people  at  home  more  than 
crushing  defeats  had  shaken  them  in  the  first  two  years 
of  the  struggle,  and  men  who  would  have  wrapped  the 
word    "  surrender "    in    periphrasis    went    about    with 
surrender  in  their  hearts.     Thus  the  two  months  that 
went  before  the  great  rally  of  the  Democrats  at  Chicago 
were  months  of  good  omen  for  a  party  which,  however 
little  the  many  honourable  men  in  its  ranks  were  willing 
to  face  the  fact,  must  base  its  only  hope  upon  the  weaken 
ing  of  the  national  will.     For  public  attention  was  turned 
away  from  other  fields  of  war  and  fixed  upon  the  Army  of 
the  Potomac.    Sherman  drove  back  Johnston,  and  routed 
Hood  ;    Farragut  at  Mobile  enriched '  the  annals  of  the 
sea  ;  but  what  told  upon  the  imagination  of  the  North 
was  that  Grant's  earlier  progress  was  followed  by  the 
definite  failure  of  his  original  enterprise  against  Lee's 
army,  by  Northern  defeats  on  the  Shenandoah  and  an 
actual  dash  by  the  South  against  Washington,  by  the 
further  failure  of  Grant's  first  assault  upon  Petersburg, 
and  by  hideous  losses  and  some  demoralisation  in  his 
army.     The   candidate   that  the  Democrats  would  put 
forward    and    the    general   principle    of    their    political 
strategy   were   well   known    many   weeks    before    their 
Convention  met  ;  and  the  Republicans  already  despaired 
of  defeating  them.     In  the  Chicago  Convention  there 
were  men,  apparently  less  reputable  in  character  than 
their    frank    attitude    suggests,    who    were    outspoken 


4io  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

against  the  war  ;  their  leader  was  Vallandigham. 
There  were  men  who  spoke  boldly  for  the  war,  but  more 
boldly  against  emancipation  and  the  faults  of  the  Govern 
ment  ;  their  leader  was  Seymour,  talking  with  the  accent 
of  dignity  and  of  patriotism.  Seymour,  for  the  war, 
presided  over  the  Convention  ;  Vallandigham,  against  the 
war,  was  the  master  spirit  in  its  debates.  It  was  hard 
for  such  men,  with  any  saving  of  conscience,  to  combine. 
The  mode  of  combination  which  they  discovered  is 
memorable  in  the  history  of  faction.  First  they  adopted 
a  platform  which  meant  peace  ;  then  they  adopted  a 
candidate  intended  to  symbolise  successful  war.  They 
resolved  "  that  this  Convention  does  explicitly  declare, 
as  the  sense  of  the  American  people,  that  after  four  years 
of  failure  to  restore  the  Union  by  the  experiment  of  war 
.  .  .  justice,  humanity,  liberty,  and  the  public  welfare 
demand  that  immediate  efforts  be  made  for  "a  cessation 
of  hostilities,  with  a  view  to  an  ultimate  convention  of 
the  States  or  other  peaceable  means,  to  the  end  that 
at  the  earliest  practicable  moment  peace  may  be  restored 
on  the  basis  of  the  Federal  Union  of  the  States."  The 
fallacy  which  named  the  Union  as  the  end  while  demand 
ing  as  a  means  the  immediate  cessation  of  hostilities 
needs  no  demonstration.  The  resolution  was  thus 
translated  :  "  Resolved  that  the  war  is  a  failure  "  ;  and 
the  translation  had  that  trenchant  accuracy  which  is 
often  found  in  American  popular  epigram.  The  candi 
date  chosen  was  McClellan  ;  McClellan  in  set  terms 
repudiated  the  resolution  that  the  war  was  a  failure,  and 
then  accepted  the  candidature.  He  meant  no  harm  to 
the  cause  of  the  Union,  but  he  meant  no  definite  and 
clearly  conceived  good.  Electors  might  now  vote 
Democratic  because  the  party  was  peaceful  or  because 
the  candidate  was  a  warrior.  The  turn  of  fortune  was 
about  to  arrest  this  combination  in  the  really  formidable 
progress  of  its  crawling  approach  to  power.  Perhaps  it 
was  not  only,  as  contemporary  observers  thought,  events 
in  the  field  that  began  within  a  few  days  to  make  havoc 
with  the  schemes  of  McClellan  and  his  managers.  Per 
haps  if  the  patience  of  the  North  had  been  tried  a  little 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          411 

longer  the  sense  of  the  people  would  still  have  recoiled 
from  the  policy  of  the  Democrats,  which  had  now  been 
defined  in  hard  outline.  As  a  matter  of  fact  it  was  only 
in  the  months  while  the  Chicago  Convention  was  still 
impending  and  for  a  few  days  or  weeks  after  it  had 
actually  taken  place  that  the  panic  of  the  Republicans 
lasted.  But  during  that  time  the  alarm  among  them  was 
very  great,  whether  it  was  wholly  due  to  the  discourage 
ment  of  the  people  about  the  war  or  originated  among 
the  leaders  and  was  communicated  to  their  flock. 
Sagacious  party  men  reported  from  their  own  neigh 
bourhoods  that  there  was  no  chance  of  winning  the 
election.  In  one  quarter  or  another  there  was  talk  of 
setting  aside  Lincoln  and  compelling  Grant  to  be  a 
candidate.  About  August  12  Lincoln  was  told  by 
Thurlow  Weed,  the  greatest  of  party  managers,  that  his 
election  was  hopeless.  Ten  days  later  he  received  the 
same  assurance  from  the  central  Republican  Committee 
through  their  chairman,  Raymond,  together  with  the 
advice  that  he  should  make  overtures  for  peace. 

Supposing  that  in  the  following  November  McClellan 
should  have  been  elected,  and  that  in  the  following 
March  he  should  have  come  into  office  with  the  war 
unfinished,  it  seems  now  hardly  credible  that  he  would 
have  returned  to  slavery,  or  at  least  disbanded  without 
protection,  the  150,000  negroes  who  were  now  serving 
the  North.  Lincoln,  however,  seriously  believed  that 
this  was  the  course  to  which  McClellan's  principles  and 
those  of  his  party  committed  him,  and  that  (policy  and 
honour  apart)  this  would  have  been  for  military  reasons 
fatal.  McClellan  had  repudiated  the  Peace  Resolution, 
but  his  followers  and  his  character  were  to  be  reckoned 
with  rather  than  his  words,  and  indeed  his  honest  prin 
ciples  committed  him  deeply  to  some  attempt  to  reverse 
Lincoln's  policy  as  to  slavery,  and  he  clearly  must  have 
been  driven  into  negotiations  with  the  South.  The 
confusion  which  must  inevitably  be  created  by  attempts 
to  satisfy  the  South,  when  it  was  in  no  humour  of 
moderation,  and  by  the  fury  which  yielding  would  have 
provoked  in  half  the  people  of  the  North,  was  well  and 


412  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

tersely  described  by  Grant  in  a  letter  to  a  friend,  which 
that  friend  published  in  support  of  Lincoln.     At  a  fair  at 
Philadelphia  for  the  help  of  the  wounded  Lincoln  said  : 
"  We   accepted   this  war  ;    we   did  not  begin  it.     We 
accepted   it   for   an   object,   and   when   that   object   is 
accomplished  the  war  will  end,  and  I  hope  to  God  that 
it  will  never  end  until  that  object  is  accomplished." 
Whatever  the  real  mind  of  McClellan  and  of  the  average 
Democrat  may  have  been,  it  was  not  this  ;    and  the 
posterity  of  Mr.  Facing-both-ways  may  succeed  in  an 
election,  but  never  in  war  or  the  making  of  lasting  peace. 
Lincoln  looked  forward  with  happiness,  after  he  was 
actually  re-elected,  to  the  quieter  pursuits  of  private  life 
which  might  await  him  in  four  years'  time.     He  looked 
forward  not  less  happily  to  a  period  of  peace  administra 
tion  first,  and  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  he  would  have 
prized  as  much  as  any  man  the  highest  honour  that  his 
countrymen    could    bestow,    a    second    election    to    the 
Presidency.     But,  even  in  a  smaller  man  who  had  passed 
through  such  an   experience   as  he  had   and  was  not 
warped  by  power,  these  personal  wishes  might  well  have 
been  merged  in  concern  for  the  cause  in  hand.     There  is 
everything  to  indicate  that  they  were  completely  so  in 
his  case.     A  President  cannot  wisely  do  much  directly 
to  promote  his  own  re-election,  but  he  appears  to  have 
done  singularly  little.     At  the  beginning  of  1864,  when 
the  end  of  the  war  seemed  near,  and  the  election  of  a 
Republican  probable,  he  may  well  have  thought  that  he 
would  be  the  Republican   candidate,  but   he  had  faced 
the  possible  choice  of  Chase  very  placidly,  and  of  Grant 
he    said,    "  If   he   takes   Richmond   let   him   have   the 
Presidency."     It  was  another  matter  when  the  war  again 
seemed  likely  to  drag  on  and  a  Democratic  President 
might  come  in  before  the  end  of  it.     An  editor  who 
visited  the  over-burdened  President  in  August  told  him 
that  he  needed  some  weeks  of  rest  and  seclusion.     But 
he  said,  "  I  cannot  fly  from  my  thoughts.     I  do  not  think 
it  is  personal  vanity  or  ambition,  though  I  am  not  free 
from  those  infirmities,  but  I  cannot  but  feel  that  the 
weal  or  woe  of  the  nation  will  be'  decided  in  November. 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          413 

There  is  no  proposal  offered  by  any  wing  of  the  Demo 
cratic  party  but  that  must  result  in  the  permanent 
destruction  of  the  Union."  He  would  have  been  well 
content  to  make  place  for  Grant  if  Grant  had  finished 
his  work.  But  that  work  was  delayed,  and  then  Lincoln 
became  greatly  troubled  by  the  movement  to  force 
Grant,  the  general  whom  he  had  at  last  found,  into 
politics  with  his  work  undone  ;  for  all  would  have  been 
lost  if  McClellan  had  come  in  with  the  war  still  pro 
gressing  badly.  Lincoln  had  been  invited  in  June  to  a 
gathering  in  honour  of  Grant,  got  up  with  the  thinly  dis 
guised  object  of  putting  the  general  forward  as  his 
rival.  He  wrote,  with  true  diplomacy:  "  It  is  impos 
sible  for  me  to  attend.  I  approve  nevertheless  of  what 
ever  may  tend  to  strengthen  and  sustain  General 
Grant  and  the  noble  armies  now  under  his  command. 
He  and  his  brave  soldiers  are  now  in  the  midst  of 
their  great  trial,  and  I  trust  that  at  your  meeting  you 
will  so  shape  your  good  words  that  they  may  turn  to 
men  and  guns,  moving  to  his  and  their  support."  In 
August  he  told  his  mind  plainly  to  Grant's  friend  Eaton. 
He  never  dreamed  for  a  moment  that  Grant  would 
willingly  go  off  into  politics  with  the  military  situation 
still  insecure,  and  he  believed  that  no  possible  pressure 
could  force  Grant  to  do  so  ;  but  on  this  latter  question 
he  wished  to  make  himself  sure ;  with  a  view  to  future 
military  measures  he  really  needed  to  be  sure  of  it. 
Eaton  saw  Grant,  and  in  the  course  of  conversation  very 
tactfully  brought  to  Grant's  notice  the  designs  of  his 
would-be  friends.  "  We  had,"  writes  Eaton,  "  been 
talking  very  quietly,  but  Grant's  reply  came  in  an  instant 
and  with  a  violence  for  which  I  was  not  prepared.  He 
brought  his  clenched  fists  down  hard  on  the  strap  arms 
of  his  camp  chair,  '  They  can't  do  it.  They  can't 
compel  me  to  do  it.'  Emphatic  gesture  was  not  a 
strong  point  with  Grant.  '  Have  you  said  this  to  the 
President  ? '  I  asked.  £  No,'  said  Grant.  '  I  have  not 
thought  it  worth  while  to  assure  the  President  of  my 
opinion.  I  consider  it  as  important  for  the  cause  that 
he  should  be  elected  as  that  the  army  should  be  successful 


414  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

in  the  field.'  '  "  I  told  you,"  said  Lincoln  afterwards, 
"  they  could  not  get  him  to  run  till  he  had  closed  out 
the  rebellion."  Since  the  great  danger  was  now  only 
that  McClellan  would  become  President  in  March,  there 
was  but  one  thing  to  do — to  try  and  finish  the  war  before 
then.  Raymond's  advice  in  favour  of  negotiations 
with  the  South  now  came,  and  Lincoln's  mode  of  replying 
to  this  has  been  noticed.  Rumours  were  afloat  that  if 
McClellan  won  in  November  there  would  be  an  attempt 
to  bring  him  irregularly  into  power  at  once.  Lincoln 
let  it  be  known  that  he  should  stay  at  his  post  at  all 
costs  till  the  last  lawful  day.  On  August  23,  in  that 
curious  way  in  which  deep  emotion  showed  itself  with 
him,  he  wrote  a  resolution  upon  a  paper,  which  he  folded 
and  asked  his  ministers  to  endorse  with  their  signatures 
without  reading  it.  They  all  wrote  their  names  on  the 
back  of  it,  ready,  if  that  were  possible,  to  commit  them 
selves  blindly  to  support  of  him  in  whatever  he  had 
resolved  ;  a  great  tribute  to  him  and  to  themselves.  He 
sealed  it  up  and  put  it  away. 

How  far  in  this  dark  time  the  confidence  of  the  people 
had  departed  from  Lincoln  no  one  can  tell.  It  might  be 
too  sanguine  a  view  of  the  world  to  suppose  that  they 
would  have  been  proof  against  what  may  be  called  a 
conspiracy  to  run  him  down.  There  were  certainly 
quarters  in  which  the  perception  of  his  worth  came  soon 
and  remained.  Not  all  those  who  are  poor  or  roughly 
brought  up  were  among  those  plain  men  whose  approval 
Lincoln  desired  and  often  expected  ;  but  at  least  the 
plain  man  does  exist  and  the  plain  people  did  read 
Lincoln's  words.  The  soldiers  of  the  armies  in  the  East 
by  this  time  knew  Lincoln  well,  and  there  were  by  now, 
as  we  shall  see,  in  every  part  of  the  North,  honest  parents 
who  had  gone  to  Washington,  and  entered  the  White 
House  very  sad,  and  came  out  very  happy,  and  taken 
their  report  of  him  home.  No  less  could  there  be  found, 
among  those  to  whom  America  had  given  the  greatest 
advantages  that  birth  and  upbringing  can  offer,  families 
in  which,  when  Lincoln  died,  a  daughter  could  write  to 
her  father  as  Lady  Harcourt  (then  Miss  Lily  Motley) 


THE   APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          415 

I  echo  your  '  thank  God  '  that  we  always 
appreciated  him  before  he  was  taken  from  us."  But  if 
we  look  at  the  political  world,  we  find  indeed  noble 
exceptions  such  as  that  of  Charles  Sumner  among  those 
who  had  been  honestly  perplexed  by  Lincoln's  attitude 
on  slavery  ;  we  have  to  allow  for  the  feelings  of  some 
good  State  Governor  who  had  come  to  him  with  a 
tiresome  but  serious  proposition  and  been  adroitly 
parried  with  an  untactful  and  coarse  apologue  ;  yet  it 
remains  to  be  said  that  a  thick  veil,  woven  of  self-conceit 
and  half-education,  blinded  most  politicians  to  any 
rare  quality  in  Lincoln,  and  blinded  them  to  what  was 
due  in  decency  to  any  man  discharging  his  task.  The 
evidence  collected  by  Mr.  Rhodes  as  to  the  tone  prevail 
ing  in  1864  at  Washington  and  among  those  in  touch 
with  Washington  suggests  that  strictly  political  society 
was  on  the  average  as  poor  in  brain  and  heart  as  the 
court  of  the  most  decadent  European  monarchy.  It 
presents  a  stern  picture  of  the  isolation,  on  one  side  at 
least,  in  which  Lincoln  had  to  live  and  work. 

A  little  before  this  crowning  period  of  Lincoln's  career 
Walt  Whitman  described  him  as  a  man  in  the  streets  of 
Washington  could  see  him,  if  he  chose.  He  has  been 
speaking  of  the  cavalry  escort  which  the  President's 
advisers  insisted  should  go  clanking  about  with  him. 
"  The  party,"  he  continues,  "  makes  no  great  show  in 
uniform  or  horses.  Mr.  Lincoln  on  the  saddle  generally 
rides  a  good-sized,  easy-going  grey  horse,  is  dressed  in 
plain  black,  somewhat  rusty  and  dusty,  and  looks  about 
as  ordinary  in  attire,  etc.,  as  the  commonest  man.  The 
entirely  unornamental  cortege  arouses  no  sensation  ; 
only  some  curious  stranger  stops  and  gazes.  I  see  very 
plainly  Abraham  Lincoln's  dark  brown  face,  with  the 
deep-cut  lines,  the  eyes  always  to  me  with  a  deep  latent 
sadness  in  the  expression.  We  have  got  so  that  we 
exchange  bows,  and  very  cordial  ones.  Sometimes  the 
President  goes  and  comes  in  an  open  barouche  "  (not,  the 
poet  intimates,  a  very  smart  turri-out).  "  Sometimes 
one  of  his  sons,  a  hoy  of  ten  or  twelve,  accompanies  him, 
riding  a  his  right  pn  a  pony,  Tb-ey  passed  me  once  very 


416  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

close,  and  I  saw  the  President  in  the  face  fully  as  they 
were  moving  slowly,  and  his  look,  though  abstracted, 
happened  to  be  directed  steadily  in  my  eye.  He  bowed 
and  smiled,  but  far  beneath  his  smile  I  noticed  well  the 
expression  I  have  alluded  to.  None  of  the  artists  or 
pictures  has  caught  the  deep  though  subtle  and  indirect 
expression  of  this  man's  face.  There  is  something  else 
there.  One  of  the  great  portrait  painters  of  two  or 
three  centuries  ago  is  needed." 

The  little  boy  on  the  pony  was  Thomas,  called  "  Tad," 
a  constant  companion  of  his  father's  little  leisure,  now 
dead.  An  elder  boy,  Robert,  has  lived  to  be  welcomed 
as  Ambassador  in  this  country,  and  was  at  this  time  a 
student  at  Harvard.  Willie,  a  clever  and  lovably 
mischievous  child,  "  the  chartered  libertine  of  the  White 
House  "  for  a  little  while,  had  died  at  the  age  of  twelve 
in  the  early  days  of  1862,  when  his  father  was  getting  so 
impatient  to  stir  McClellan  into  action.  These  and  a 
son  who  had  long  before  died  in  infancy  were  the  only 
children  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Lincoln.  Little  has  been  made 
public  concerning  them,  but  enough  to  convey  the 
impression  of  a  wise  and  tender  father,  trusted  by  his 
children  and  delighting  in  them.  John  Nicolay,  his  loyal 
and  capable  secretary,  and  the  delightful  John  Hay  must 
be  reckoned  on  the  cheerful  side — for  there  was  one — 
of  Lincoln's  daily  life.  The  life  of  the  home  at  the  White 
House,  and  sometimes  in  summer  at  the  "  Soldiers' 
Home  "  near  Washington,  was  simple,  and  in  his  own 
case  (not  in  that  of  his  guests)  regardless  of  the  time, 
sufficiency,  or  quality  of  meals.  He  cannot  have  given 
people  much  trouble,  but  he  gave  some  to  the  guard  who 
watched  him,  themselves  keenly  watched  by  Stanton  ; 
for  he  loved,  if  he  could,  to  walk  alone  from  his  midnight 
conferences  at  the  War  Department  to  the  White  House 
or  the  Soldiers'  Home.  The  barest  history  of  the  events 
with  which  he  dealt  is  proof  enough  of  long  and  hard  and 
anxious  working  days,  which  continued  with  hardly  a 
break  through  four  years.  In  that  history  many  a 
complication  has  here  been  barely  glanced  at  or  clean 
left  out  ;  in  this  year,  for  example,  the  difficulty  about 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          417 

France  and  Mexico  and  the  failure  of  the  very  estimable 
Banks  in  Texas  have  been  but  briefly  noted.  And  there 
must  be  remembered,  in  addition,  the  duty  of  a  President 
to  be  accessible  to  all  people,  a  duty  which  Lincoln 
especially  strove  to  fulfil. 

Apart  from  formal  receptions,  the  stream  of  callers 
on  him  must  have  given  Lincoln  many  compensations 
for  its  huge  monotony.  Very  odd,  and  sometimes 
attractive,  samples  of  human  nature  would  come  under 
his  keen  eye.  •  Now  and  then  a  visitor  came  neither  with 
a  troublesome  request,  nor  for  form's  sake  or  for  curiosity, 
but  in  simple  honesty  to  pay  a  tribute  of  loyalty  or 
speak  a  word  of  good  cheer  which  Lincoln  received  with 
unfeigned  gratitude.  Farmers  and  back-country  folk 
of  the  type  he  could  best  talk  with,  came  and  had  more 
time  than  he  ought  to  have  spared  bestowed  on  them. 
At  long  intervals  there  came  a  friend  of  very  different 
days.  Some  ingenious  men,  for  instance,  fitted  out  Dennis 
Hanks  in  a  new  suit  of  clothes  and  sent  him  as  their 
ambassador  to  plead  for  certain  political  offenders,  It 
is  much  to  be  feared  that  they  were  more  successful  than 
they  deserved,  though  Stanton  intervened  and  Dennis, 
when  he  had  seen  him,  favoured  his  old  companion,  the 
President,  with  advice  to  dismiss  that  minister.  But 
the  immense  variety  of  puzzling  requests  to  be  dealt 
with  in  such  interviews  must  have  made  heavy  demands 
upon  a  conscientious  and  a  kind  man,  especially  if  his 
conscience  and  his  kindness  were,  in  small  matters, 
sometimes  at  variance.  Lincoln  sent  a  multitude  away 
with  that  feeling,  so  grateful  to  poor  people,  that  at 
least  they  had  received  such  hearing  as  it  was  possible  to 
give  them ;  and  in  dealing  with  the  applications  which 
imposed  the  greatest  strain  on  himself  he  made  an 
ineffaceable  impression  upon  the  memory  of  his  country 
men. 

The  American  soldier  did  not  take  naturally  to  dis 
cipline.  Death  sentences,  chiefly  for  desertion  or  for 
sleeping  or  other  negligence  on  the  part  of  sentries,  were 
continually  being  passed  by  courts-martial.  In  some 
cases  or  at  some  period  these  used  to  come  before  the 


4i  8  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

President  on  a  stated  day  of  the  week,  of  which  Lincoln 
would  often  speak  with  horror.  He  was  continually 
being  appealed  to  in  relation  to  such  sentences  by  the 
father  or  mother  of  the  culprit,  or  some  friend.  At  one 
time,  it  may  be,  he  was  too  ready  with  pardon ;  "  You 
do  not  know,"  he  said,  "  how  hard  it  is  to  let  a  human 
being  die,  when  you  feel  that  a  stroke  of  your  pen  will 
save  him."  Butler  used  to  write  to  him  that  he  was 
destroying  the  discipline  of  the  army.  A  letter  of  his  to 
Meade  shows  clearly  that,  later  at  least,  he  did  not  wish 
to  exercise  a  merely  cheap  and  inconsiderate  mercy. 
The  import  of  the  numberless  pardon  stories  really  is 
that  he  would  spare  himself  no  trouble  to  enquire,  and  to 
intervene  wherever  he  could  rightly  give  scope  to  his 
longing  for  clemency.  A  Congressman  might  force  his 
way  into  his  bedroom  in  the  middle  of  the  night,  rouse 
him  from  his  sleep  to  bring  to  his  notice  extenuating 
facts  that  had  been  overlooked,  and  receive  the  decision, 
"  Well,  I  don't  see  that  it  will  do  him  any  good  to  be 
shot."  It  is  related  that  William  Scott,  a  lad  from  a 
farm  in  Vermont,  after  a  tremendous  march  in  the 
Peninsula  campaign  volunteered  to  do  double  guard 
duty  to  spare  a  sick  comrade,  slept  at  his  post,  was 
caught,  and  was  under  sentence  of  death,  when  the 
President  came  to  the  army  and  heard  of  him.  The 
President  visited  him,  chatted  about  his  home,  looked 
at  his  mother's  photograph,  and  so  forth.  Then  he  laid 
his  hands  on  the  boy's  shoulders  and  said  with  a 
trembling  voice,  "  My  boy,  you  are  not  going  to  be  shot. 
I  believe  you  when  you  tell  me  that  you  could  not  keep 
awake.  I  am  going  to  trust  you  and  send  you  back  to 
the  regiment.  But  I  have  been  put  to  a  great  deal  of 
trouble  on  your  account.  .  .  .  Now  what  I  want  to 
know  is,  how  are  you  going  to  pay  my  bill  ?  "  Scott 
told  afterwards  how  difficult  it  was  to  think,  when  his 
fixed  expectation  of  death  was  suddenly  changed ;  but 
how  he  managed  to  master  himself,  thank  Mr.  Lincoln 
and  reckon  up  how,  with  his  pay  and  what  his  parents 
could  raise  by  mortgage  on  their  farm  and  some  help 
from  his  comrades,  he  might  pay  the  bill  if  it  were  not 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          419 

more  than  five  or  six  hundred  dollars.  "  But  it  is  a  great 
deal  more  than  that,"  said  the  President.  "  My  bill  is  a 
very  large  one.  Your  friends  cannot  pay  it,  nor  your 
bounty,  nor  the  farm,  nor  all  your  comrades.  There  is 
only  one  man  in  the  world  who  can  pay  it,  and  his  name 
is  William  Scott.  If  from  this  day  William  Scott  does 
his  duty,  so  that,  when  he  comes  to  die,  he  can  look  me 
in  the  face  as  he  does  now  and  say,  '  I  have  kept  my 
promise  and  I  have  done  my  duty  as  a  soldier,'  then  my 
debt  will  be  paid.  Will  you  make  the  promise  and  try 
to  keep  it  ?  "  And  William  Scott  did  promise  ;  and, 
not  very  long  after,  he  was  desperately  wounded,  and  he 
died,  but  not  before  he  could  send  a  message  to  the 
President  that  he  had  tried  to  be  a  good  soldier,  and  would 
have  paid  his  debt  in  full  if  he  had  lived,  and  that  he  died 
thinking  of  Lincoln's  kind  face  and  thanking  him  for  the 
chance  he  gave  him  to  fall  like  a  soldier  in  battle.  If  the 
story  is  not  true — and  there  is  no  reason  whatever  to 
doubt  it — still  it  is  a  remarkable  man  of  whom  people 
spin  yarns  of  that  kind. 

When  Lincoln's  strength  became  visibly  tried  friends 
often  sought  to  persuade  him  to  spare  himself  the  need 
less,  and  to  him  very  often  harrowing,  labour  of  incessant 
interviews.  They  never  succeeded.  Lincoln  told  them 
he  could  not  forget  what  he  himself  would  feel  in  the 
place  of  the  many  poor  souls  who  came  to  him  desiring 
so  little  and  with  so  little  to  get.  But  he  owned  to  the 
severity  of  the  strain.  He  was  not  too  sensitive  to  the 
ridicule  and  reproach  that  surrounded  him.  "  Give 
yourself  no  uneasiness  ; "  he  had  once  said  to  someone 
who  had  sympathised  with  him  over  some  such  annoy 
ance,  "  I  have  endured  a  great  deal  of  ridicule  without 
much  malice,  and  have  received  a  great  deal  of  kindness 
not  quite  free  from  ridicule.  I  am  used  to  it."  But  the 
gentle  nature  that  such  words  express,  and  that  made 
itself  deeply  felt  by  those  that  were  nearest  him,  cannot 
but  have  suffered  from  want  of  appreciation.  With  all 
this  added  to  the  larger  cares,  which  before  the  closing 
phases  of  the  war  opened  had  become  so  intense,  Lincoln 
must  have  been  taxed  near  to  the  limit  of  what  men  have 


420  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

endured  without  loss  of  judgment,  or  loss  of  courage 
or  loss  of  ordinary  human  feeling.  There  is  no  sign  that 
any  of  these  things  happened  to  him  ;  the  study  of  his 
record  rather  shows  a  steady  ripening  of  mind  and 
character  to  the  end.  It  has  been  seen  how  throughout 
his  previous  life  the  melancholy  of  his  temperament 
impressed  those  who  had  the  opportunity  of  observing 
it.  A  colleague  of  his  at  the  Illinois  bar  has  told  how 
on  circuit  he  sometimes  came  down  in  the  morning  and 
found  Lincoln  sitting  alone  over  the  embers  of  the  fire, 
where  he  had  sat  all  night  in  sad  meditation,  after  an 
evening  of  jest  apparently  none  the  less  hilarious  for 
his  total  abstinence.  There  was  no  scope  for  this  brood 
ing  now,  and  in  a  sense  the  time  of  his  severest  trial 
cannot  have  been  the  saddest  time  of  Lincoln's  life.  It 
must  have  been  a  cause  not  of  added  depression  but  of 
added  strength  that  he  had  long  been  accustomed  to 
face  the  sternest  aspect  of  the  world.  He  had  within 
his  own  mind  two  resources,  often,  perhaps  normally, 
associated  together,  but  seldom  so  fully  combined  as 
with  him.  In  his  most  intimate  circle  he  would  draw 
upon  his  stores  of  poetry,  particularly  of  tragedy ; 
often,  for  instance,  he  would  recite  such  speeches  as 
Richard  II. 's : 

"  For  God's  sake  let  us  sit  upon  the  ground 
And  tell  sad  stories  of  the  death  of  kings. 
..  ,.,.,  ../;  tpfcl  ...  ,  «.  All  murdered." 

Slighter  acquaintances  saw,  day  by  day,  another  element 
in  his  thoughts,  the  companion  to  this  ;  for  the  hardly 
interrupted  play  of  humour  in  which  he  found  relief  con 
tinued  to  help  him  to  the  end.  Whatever  there  was  in  it 
i  either  of  mannerism  or  of  coarseness,  no  one  can  grudge  it 
him  ;  it  is  an  oddity  which  endears.  The  humour  of  real 
life  fades  in  reproduction,  but  Lincoln's,  there  is  no  doubt, 
was  a  vein  of  genuine  comedy,  deep,  rich,  and  unsoured, 
of  a  larger  human  quality  than  marks  the  brilliant  works 
of  literary  American  humorists.  It  was,  like  the  comedy 
of  Shakespeare,  plainly  if  unaccountably  akin  with  the 
graver  and  grander  strain  of  thought  and  feeling  that 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          421 

inspired  the  greatest  of  his  speeches.  Physically  his 
splendid  health  does  not  seem  to  have  been  impaired 
beyond  recovery.  But  it  was  manifestly  near  to 
breaking ;  and  the  "  deep-cut  lines "  were  cut  still 
deeper,  and  the  long  legs  were  always  cold. 

The  cloud  over  the  North  passed  very  suddenly.  The 
North  indeed  paid  the  penalty  of  a  nation  which  is  spared 
the  full  strain  of  a  war  at  the  first,  and  begins  to  discover 
its  seriousness  when  the  hope  of  easy  victory  has  been 
many  times  dashed  down.  It  has  been  necessary  to 
dwell  upon  the  despondency  which  at  one  time  prevailed  ; 
but  it  would  be  hard  to  rate  too  highly  the  military 
difficulty  of  the  conquest  undertaken  by  the  North,  or 
the  trial  involved  to  human  nature  by  perseverance  in 
such  a  task.  If  the  depression  during  the  summer  was 
excessive,  as  it  clearly  was,  at  least  the  recovery  which 
followed  was  fully  adequate  to  the  occasion  which  pro 
duced  it.  On  September  2  Sherman  telegraphed, 
"  Atlanta  is  ours  and  fairly  won."  The  strategic 
importance  of  earlier  successes  may  have  been  greater, 
but  the  most  ignorant  man  who  looked  at  a  map  could 
see  what  it  signified  that  the  North  could  occupy  an 
important  city  in  the  heart  of  Georgia.  Then  they 
recalled  Farragut's  victory  of  a  month  before.  Then 
there  followed,  close  to  Washington,  putting  an  end  to 
a  continual  menace,  stirring  and  picturesquely  brilliant 
beyond  other  incidents  of  the  war,  Sheridan's  repeated 
victories  in  the  Shenandoah  Valley.  The  war  which 
had  been  "  voted  a  failure  "  was  evidently  not  a  failure. 
At  the  same  time  men  of  high  character  conducted  a 
vigorous  campaign  of  speeches  for  Lincoln.  General 
Schurz,  the  German  revolutionary  Liberal,  who  lived  to 
tell  Bismarck  at  his  table  that  he  still  preferred  democracy 
to  his  amused  host's  method  of  government,  sacrificed 
his  command  in  the  Army — for  Lincoln  told  him  it 
could  not  be  restored — to  speak  for  Lincoln.  Even 
Chase  was  carried  away,  and  after  months  of  insidious 
detraction,  went  for  Lincoln  on  the  stump.  In  the 
elections  in  November  Lincoln  was  elected  by  an 
enormous  popular  majority,  giving  him  212  out  of  the 


422  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

233  votes  in  the  electoral  college,  where  in  form  the 
election  is  made.  Three  Northern  States  only,  one  of 
them  his  native  State,  had  gone  against  him.  He  made 
some  little  speeches  to  parties  which  came  to  "  serenade  " 
him  ;  some  were  not  very  formal  speeches,  for,  as  he  said, 
he  was  now  too  old  to  "  care  much  about  the  mode  of 
doing  things."  But  one  was  this  :  "  It  has  long  been  a 
grave  question  whether  any  Government  not  too  strong 
for  the  liberties  of  its  people  can  be  strong  enough  to 
maintain  its  existence  in  great  emergencies.  On  this 
point  the  present  rebellion  brought  our  Government  to  a 
severe  test,  and  a  Presidential  election  occurring  in  regular 
course  during  the  rebellion  added  not  a  little  to  the  strain. 
But  we  cannot  have  a  free  Government  without  elections; 
and  if  the  rebellion  could  force  us  to  forgo  or  postpone 
a  national  election  it  might  fairly  claim  to  have  already 
conquered  and  ruined  us.  But  the  election  along  with 
its  incidental  and  undesirable  strife  has  done  good  too. 
It  has  demonstrated  that  a  people's  Government  can 
sustain  a  national  election  in  the  midst  of  a  great  civil 
war.  Until  now  it  has  not  been  known  to  the  world  that 
this  was  a  possibility.  But  the  rebellion  continues,  and 
now  that  the  election  is  over  may  not  all  have  a  common 
interest  to  reunite  in  a  common  effort  to  save  our  common 
country  ?  For  my  own  part  I  have  striven  and  shall 
strive  to  avoid  placing  any  obstacle  in  the  way.  So  long 
as  I  have  been  here  I  have  not  willingly  planted  a  thorn 
in  any  man's  bosom.  While  I  am  duly  sensible  to  the 
high  compliment  of  a  re-election,  and  duly  grateful  as  I 
trust  to  Almighty  God  for  having  directed  my  country 
men  to  a  right  conclusion,  as  I  think,  for  their  good,  it 
adds  nothing  to  my  satisfaction  that  any  man  may  be 
disappointed  by  the  result.  May  I  ask  those  who  have 
not  differed  from  me  to  join  with  me  in  this  same  spirit 
towards  those*  who  have  ?  And  now  let  me  close  by 
asking  three  hearty  cheers  for  our  brave  soldiers  and 
seamen,  and  their  gallant  and  skilful  commanders." 

In  the  Cabinet  he  brought  out  the  paper  that  he  had 
sealed  up  in  the  dark  days  of  August  ;  he  reminded  his 
ministers  of  how  they  had  endorsed  it  unread,  and  he 


THE  APPROACH  OF  VICTORY          423 

read  it  them.  Its  contents  ran  thus  :  "  This  morning,  as 
for  some  days  past,  it  seems  exceedingly  probable  that 
this  Administration  will  not  be  re-elected.  Then  it  will 
be  my  duty  to  so  co-operate  with  the  President-elect  as 
to  save  the  Union  between  the  election  and  the  inaugura 
tion,  as  he  will  have  secured  his  election  on  such  ground 
that  he  cannot  possibly  save  it  afterwards."  Lincoln 
explained  what  he  had  intended  to  do  if  McClellan  had 
won.  He  would  have  gone  to  him  and  said,  "  General, 
this  election  shows  that  you  are  stronger,  have  more 
influence  with  the  people  of  this  country  than  I  "  ;  and 
he  would  have  invited  him  to  co-operate  in  saving  the 
Union  now,  by  using  that  great  influence  to  secure  from 
the  people  the  willing  enlistment  of  enough  recruits. 
"  And  the  general,"  said  Seward,  "  would  have  said, 
'  Yes,  yes ' ;  and  again  the  next  day,  when  you  spoke  to 
him  about  it,  '  Yes,  yes  '  ;  and  so  on  indefinitely,  and 
he  would  have  done  nothing." 

"  Seldom  in  history,"  wrote  Emerson  in  a  letter  after 
the  election,  "  was  so  much  staked  upon  a  popular  vote. 
I  suppose  never  in  history." 

And  to  those  Americans  of  all  classes  and  in  all 
districts  of  the  North,  who  had  set  their  hearts  and  were 
giving  all  they  had  to  give  to  preserve  the  life  of  the 
nation,  the  political  crisis  of  1864  would  seem  to  have 
been  the  most  anxious  moment  of  the  war.  It  is  impos 
sible — it  must  be  repeated — to  guess  how  great  the 
danger  really  was  that  their  popular  government  might 
in  the  result  betray  the  true  and  underlying  will  of  the 
people  ;  for  in  any  country  (and  in  America  perhaps  more 
than  most)  the  average  of  politicians,  whose  voices  are 
most  loudly  heard,  can  only  in  a  rough  and  approximate 
fashion  be  representative.  But  there  is  in  any  case,  no 
cause  for  surprise  that  the  North  should  at  one  time 
have  trembled.  Historic  imagination  is  easily,  though 
not  one  whit  too  deeply,  moved  by  the  heroic  stand  of  the 
South.  It  is  only  after  the  effort  to  understand  the  light 
in  which  the  task  of  the  North  has  presented  itself  to 
capable  soldiers,  that  a  civilian  can  perceive  what  sus 
tained  resolution  was  required  if,  though  far  the  stronger, 


424  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

it  was  to  make  its  strength  tell.  Notwithstanding  the 
somewhat  painful  impression  which  the  political  chro 
nicle  of  this  time  at  some  points  gives,  it  is  the  fact 
that  the  wisest  Englishmen  who  were  in  those  days  in 
America  and  had  means  of  observing  what  passed  have 
retained  a  lasting  sense  of  the  constancy,  under  trial,  of 
the  North. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE    END 

ON  December  6,  1864,  Lincoln  sent  the  last  of  his 
Annual  Messages  to  Congress.  He  treated  as  matter 
for  oblivion  the  "  impugning  of  motives  and  heated 
controversy  as  to  the  proper  means  of  advancing  the 
Union  cause,"  which  had  played  so  large  a  part  in  the 
Presidential  election  and  the  other  elections  of  the 
autumn.  For,  as  he  said,  "  on  the  distinct  issue  of  Union 
or  no  Union  the  politicians  have  shown  their  instinctive 
knowledge  that  there  is  no  diversity  among  the  people." 
This  was  accurate  as  well  as  generous,  for  though  many 
Democrats  had  opposed  the  war,  none  had  avowed  that 
for  the  sake  of  peace  he  would  give  up  the  Union. 
Passing  then  to  the  means  by  which  the  Union  could  be 
made  to  prevail  he  wrote  :  "  On  careful  consideration 
of  all  the  evidence  accessible  it  seems  to  me  that  no 
attempt  at  negotiation  with  the  insurgent  leader  could 
result  in  any  good.  He  would  accept  nothing  short  of- 
severance  of  the  Union — precisely  what  we  will  not  and 
cannot  give.  Between  him  and  us  the  issue  is  distinct, 
simple,  and  inflexible.  It  is  an  issue  which  can  only  be 
tried  by  war  and  decided  by  victory.  The  abandonment 
of  armed  resistance  to  the  national  authority  on  the  part 
of  the  insurgents  is  the  only  indispensable  condition  to 
ending  the  war  on  the  part  of  the  Government."  To 
avoid  a  possible  misunderstanding  he  added  that  not  a 
single  person  who  was  free  by  the  terms  of  the  Emancipa 
tion  Proclamation  or  of  any  Act  of  Congress  would  be 
returned  to  slavery  while  he  held  the  executive  authority. 
"  If  the  people  should  by  whatever  mode  or  means,  make 
it  an  executive  duty  to  re-enslave  such  persons,  another 
and  not  I,  must  be  their  instrument  to  perform  it." 


426  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

This  last  sentence  was  no  meaningless  flourish  ;  the 
Constitutional  Amendment  prohibiting  slavery  could 
not  be  passed  for  some  time,  and  might  conceivably  be 
defeated  ;  in  the  meantime  the  Courts  might  possibly 
have  declared  any  negro  in  the  Southern  States  a  slave  ; 
Lincoln's  words  let  it  be  seen  that  they  would  have 
found  themselves  without  an  arm  to  enforce  their 
decision.  But  in  fact  there  was  no  longer  an  issue  with 
the  South  as  to  abolition.  Jefferson  Davis  had  himself 
declared  that  slavery  was  gone,  for  most  slaves  had  now 
freed  themselves,  and  that  he  for  his  part  troubled  very 
little  over  that.  There  remained,  then,  no  issue  between 
North  and  South  except  that  between  Independence  and 
Union.  fi .  ,. 

On  the  same  day  that  he  sent  his  annual  message 
Lincoln  gave  himself  a  characteristic  pleasure  by  another 
communication  which  he  sent  to  the  Senate.  Old  Roger 
Taney  of  the  Dred  Scott  case  had  died  in  October  ;  the 
Senate  was  now  requested  to  confirm  the  President's 
nomination  of  a  new  Chief  Justice  to  succeed  him  ;  and 
the  President  had  nominated  Chase.  Chase's  reputation 
as  a  lawyer  had  seemed  to  fit  him  for  the  position,  but 
the  well  informed  declared  that,  in  spite  of  some 
appearances  on  the  platform  for  Lincoln  he  still  kept 
"  going  around  peddling  his  griefs  in  private  ears  and 
sowing  dissatisfaction  against  Lincoln."  So  in  spite  of 
Lincoln's  pregnant  remark  on  this  subject  that  he  "  did 
not  believe  in  keeping  any  man  under,"  nobody  supposed 
that  Lincoln  would  appoint  him.  Sumner  and  Con 
gressman  Alley  of  Massachusetts  had  indeed  gone  to 
Lincoln  to  urge  the  appointment.  "  We  found,  to  our 
dismay,"  Alley  relates,  "  that  the  President  had  heard  of 
the  bitter  criticisms  of  Mr.  Chase  upon  himself  and  his 
Administration.  Mr.  Lincoln  urged  many  of  Chase's 
defects,  to  discover,  as  we  afterwards  learned,  how  his 
objection  could  be  answered.  We  were  both  discouraged 
and  made  up  our  minds  that  the  President  did  not  mean 
to  appoint  Mr.  Chase.  It  really  seemed  too  much  to 
expect  of  poor  human  nature."  One  morning  Alley 
again  saw  the  President.  "  I  have  something  to  tell 


THE  END  427 

you  that  will  make  you  happy,"  said  Lincoln.  "  I  have 
just  sent  Mr.  Chase  word  that  he  is  to  be  appointed  Chief 
Justice,  and  you  are  the  first  man  I  have  told  of  it." 
Alley  said  something  natural  about  Lincoln's  mag 
nanimity,  but  was  told  in  reply  what  the  only  real 
difficulty  had  been.  Lincoln  from  his  "  convictions  of 
duty  to  the  Republican  party  and  the  country  "  had 
always  meant  to  appoint  Chase,  subject  to  one  doubt 
which  he  had  revolved  in  his  mind  till  he  had  settled  it. 
This  doubt  was  simply  whether  Chase,  beset  as  he  was 
by  a  craving  for  the  Presidency  which  he  could  never 
obtain,  would  ever  really  turn  his  attention  with  a  will 
to  becoming  the  great  Chief  Justice  that  Lincoln  thought 
he  could  be.  Lincoln's  occasional  failures  of  tact  had 
sometimes  a  noble  side  to  them  ;  he  even  thought  now 
of  writing  to  Chase  and  telling  him  with  simple  serious 
ness  where  he  felt  his  temptation  lay,  and  he  with 
difficulty  came  to  see  Hhat  this  attempt  at  brotherly 
frankness  would  be  misconstrued  by  a  suspicious  and 
jealous  man.  Charles  Sumner,  Chase's  advocate  on 
this  occasion,  was  all  this  time  the  most  weighty  and  the 
most  pronounced  of  those  Radicals  who  were  beginning 
to  press  for  unrestricted  negro  suffrage  in  the  South  and 
in  general  for  a  hard  and  inelastic  scheme  of  "  recon 
struction,"  which  they  would  have  imposed  on  the 
conquered  South  without  an  attempt  to  conciliate  the 
feeling  of  the  vanquished  or  to  invite  their  co-operation 
in  building  up  the  new  order.  He  was  thus  the  chief 
opponent  of  that  more  tentative,  but  as  is  now  seen, 
more  liberal  and  more  practical  policy  which  lay  very 
close  to  Lincoln's  heart  ;  enough  has  been  said  of  him  to 
suggest  too  that  this  grave  person,  bereft  of  any  glimmer 
ing  of  fun,  was  in  one  sense  no  congenial  companion  for 
Lincoln.  But  he  was  stainlessly  unselfish  and  sincere, 
and  he  was  the  politician  above  all  others  in  Washington 
with  whom  Lincoln  most  gladly  and  most  successfully 
maintained  easy  social  intercourse.  And,  to  please  him 
in  little  ways,  Lincoln  would  disentangle  his  long  frame 
from  the  "  grotesque  position  of  comfort  "  into  which  he 
had  twisted  it  in  talk  with  some  other  friend,  and  would 


428  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

assume  in  an  instant  a  courtly  demeanour  when  Sumner 
was  about  to  enter  his  room. 

Upon  the  last  day  of  January,  1865,  the  joint  resolu 
tion  of  the  two  Houses  in  favour  of  the  Constitutional 
Amendment  to  prohibit  slavery  received  the  President's 
signature.  As  has  been  explained,  it  could  have  no 
effect  till  many  months  later  the  requisite  majority  of 
States  had  accepted  it.  Before  that  time  the  Confederate 
Congress  had,  on  March  13,  1865,  closed  its  last,  most 
anxious  and  distracted,  session  by  passing  an  Act  for 
the  enlistment  of  negro  volunteers,  who  were  to  become 
free  on  enlistment.  As  a  military  measure  it  was 
belated  and  inoperative,  but  nothing  could  more  elo 
quently  have  marked  the  practical  extinction  of  slavery 
which  the  war  had  wrought  than  the  consent  of  Southern 
legislators  to  convert  the  remaining  slaves  into  soldiers. 

The  military  operations  of  1865  had  proceeded  but  a 
very  little  way  when  the  sense.-  of  what  they  portended 
was  felt  among  the  Southern  leaders  in  Richmond.  The 
fall  of  that  capital  itself  might  be  hastened  or  be 
delayed  ;  Lee's  army  if  it  escaped  from  Richmond  might 
prolong  resistance  for  a  shorter  or  for  a  longer  time,  but 
Sherman's  march  to  the  sea,  and  the  far  harder  achieve 
ments  of  the  same  kind  which  he  was  now  beginning, 
made  the  South  feel,  as  he  knew  it  would  feel,  that  not  a 
port,  not  an  arsenal,  not  a  railway,  not  a  corn  district  of 
the  South  lay  any  longer  beyond  the  striking  range  of  the 
North.  Congressmen  and  public  officials  in  Richmond 
knew  that  the  people  of  the  South  now  longed  for  peace 
and  that  the  authority  of  the  Confederacy  was  gone. 
They  beset  Jefferson  Davis  with  demands  that  he  should 
start  negotiations.  But  none  of  them  had  determined 
what  price  they  would  pay  for  peace  ;  and  there  was  not 
among  them  any  will  that  could  really  withstand  their 
President.  In  one  point  indeed  Jefferson  Davis  did 
wisely  yield.  On  February  9,  1865  he  consented  to 
make  Lee  General-in-Chief  of  all  the  Southern  armies. 
This  belated  delegation  of  larger  authority  to  Lee  had 
certain  military  results,  but  no  political  result  whatever. 
Lee  could  have  been  the  dictator  of  the  Confederacy  if 


THE  END  429 

he  had  chosen,  and  no  one  then  or  since  would  have 
blamed  him  ;  but  it  was  not  in  his  mind  to  do  anything 
but  his  duty  as  a  soldier.  The  best  beloved  and  most 
memorable  by  far  of  all  the  men  who  served  that  lost 
cause,  he  had  done  nothing  to  bring  about  secession  at  the 
beginning,  nor  now  did  he  do  anything  but  conform  to  the 
wishes  of  his  political  chief.  As  for  that  chief,  Lincoln 
had  interpreted  Davis'  simple  position  quite  rightly. 
Having  once  embraced  the  cause  of  Southern  indepen 
dence  and  taken  the  oath  as  chief  magistrate  of  an 
independent  Confederacy,  he  would  not  yield  up  that 
cause  while  there  was  a  man  to  obey  his  orders.  Whether 
this  attitude  should  be  set  down,  as  it  usually  has  been 
set  down,  to  a  diseased  pride  or  to  a  very  real  heroism  on 
his  part,  he  never  faced  the  truth  that  the  situation  was 
desperate  and  the  spirit  of  his  people  daunted  at  last. 
But  it  is  probable  that  just  like  Lincoln  he  was  ready 
that  those  who  were  in  haste  to  make  peace  should  see 
what  peace  involved  ;  and  it  is  probable  too  that,  in  his 
terrible  position,  he  deluded  himself  with  some  vague 
and  vain  hopes  as  to  the  attitude  of  the  North.  Lincoln 
on  the  other  hand  would  not  enter  into  any  proceedings 
in  which  the  secession  of  the  South  was  treated  otherwise 
than  as  a  rebellion  which  must  cease  ;  but  this  did  not 
absolutely  compel  him  to  refuse  every  sort  of  informal 
communication  with  influential  men  in  the  South,  which 
might  help  them  to  see  where  they  stood  and  from  which 
he  too  might  learn  something. 

Old  Mr.  Francis  Blair,  the  father  of  Lincoln's  late 
Postmaster-General,  was  the  last  of  the  honest  peace 
makers  whom  Lincoln  had  allowed  to  see  things  for 
themselves  by  meeting  Jefferson  Davis.  His  visit  took 
place  in  January,  1865,  and  from  his  determination  to  be 
a  go-between  and  the  curious  and  difficult  position  in 
which  Lincoln  and  Davis  both  stood  in  this  respect 
an  odd  result  arose.  .The  Confederate  Vice-President 
Stephens,  who  had  preached  peace  in  the  autumn 
without  a  quarrel  with  Davis,  and  two  other  Southern 
leaders  presented  themselves  at  Grant's  headquarters 
with  the  pathetic  misrepresentation  that  they  were  sent 


430  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

by  Davis  on  a  mission  which  Lincoln  had  undertaken  to 
receive.  What  they  could  show  was  authority  from 
Davis  to  negotiate  with  Lincoln  on  the  footing  of  the 
independence  of  the  Confederacy,  and  a  politely  turned 
intimation  from  Lincoln  that  he  would  at  any  time  receive 
persons  informally  sent  to  talk  with  a  view  to  the  surren 
der  of  the  rebel  armies.  Grant,  however,  was  deeply 
impressed  with  the  sincerity  of  their  desire  for  peace,  and 
he  entreated  Lincoln  to  receive  them.  Lincoln  therefore 
decided  to  overlook  the  false  pretence  under  which  they 
came.  He  gave  Grant  strict  orders  not  to  delay  his 
operations  on  this  account,  but  he  came  himself  with 
Seward  and  met  Davis'  three  commissioners  on  a  ship  at 
Hampton  Roads  on  February  3.  He  and  Stephens  had 
in  old  days  been  Whig  Congressmen  together,  and  Lincoln 
had  once  been  moved  to  tears  by  a  speech  of  Stephens. 
They  met  now  as  friends.  Lincoln  lost  no  time  in 
making  his  position  clear.  The  unhappy  commissioners 
made  every  effort  to  lead  him  away  from  the  plain 
ground  he  had  chosen.  It  is  evident  that  they  and 
possible  that  Jefferson  Davis  had  hoped  that  when  face 
to  face  with  them  he  would  change  his  mind,  and 
possibly  Blair's  talk  had  served  to  encourage  this  hope. 
They  failed,  but  the  conversation  continued  in  a  frank 
and  friendly  manner.  Lincoln  told  them  very  freely 
his  personal  opinions  as  to  how  the  North  ought  to  treat 
the  South  when  it  did  surrender,  but  was  careful  to 
point  out  that  he  could  make  no  promise  or  bargain, 
except  indeed  this  promise  that  so  far  as  penalties  for 
rebellion  were  concerned  the  executive  power,  which  lay 
in  his  sole  hands,  would  be  liberally  used.  Slavery  was 
discussed,  and  Seward  told  them  of  the  Constitutional 
Amendment  which  Congress  had  now  submitted  to  the 
people.  One  of  the  commissioners  returning  again-  to 
Lincoln's  refusal  to  negotiate  with  armed  rebels,  as  he 
considered  them,  cited  the  precedent  of  Charles  I.'s 
conduct  in  this  respect.  "  I  do  not  profess,"  said  Lincoln, 
"  to  be  posted  in  history.  On  all  such  matters  I  turn 
you  over  to  Seward.  All  I  distinctly  recollect  about 
Charles  I.  is  that  he  lost  his  head  in  the  end."  Then  he 


THE  END  431 

broke  out  into  simple  advice  to  Stephens  as  to  the  action 
he  could  now  pursue.  He  had  to  report  to  Congress 
afterwards  that  the  conference  had  had  no  result.  He 
brought  home,  however,  a  personal  compliment  which 
he  valued.  "  I  understand,  then,"  Stephens  had  said, 
"  that  you  regard  us  as  rebels,  who  are  liable  to  be 
hanged  for  treason."  "  That  is  so,"  said  Lincoln. 
"  Well,"  said  Stephens,  "  We  supposed  that  would  have 
to  be  your  view.  But,  to  tell  you  the  truth,  we  have 
none  of  us  been  much  afraid  of  -being  hanged  with  you 
as  President."  He  brought  home,  besides  the  compli 
ment,  an  idea  of  a  kind  which",  if  he  could  have  had  his 
way  with  his  friends  might  have  been  rich  in  good.  He 
had  discovered  how  hopeless  the  people  of  the  South  were, 
and  he  considered  whether  a  friendly  pronouncement 
might  not  lead  them  more  readily  to  surrender.  He 
deplored  the  suffering  in  which  the  South  might  now  lie 
plunged,  and  it  was  a  fixed  part  of  his  creed  that  slavery 
was  the  sin  not  of  the  South  but  of  the  nation.  So  he 
spent  the  day  after  his  return  in  drafting  a  joint  resolution 
which  he  hoped  the  two  Houses  of  Congress  might  pass, 
and  a  Proclamation  which  he  would  in  that  case  issue. 
In  these  he  proposed  to  offer  to  the  Southern  States  four 
hundred  million  dollars  in  United  States  bonds,  being, 
as  he  calculated  the  cost  to  the  North  of  two  hundred 
days  of  war,  to  be  allotted  among  those  States  in  propor 
tion  to  the  property  in  slaves  which  each  had  lost.  One 
half  of  this  sum  was  to  be  paid  at  once  if  the  war  ended 
by  April  j,  and  the  other  half  upon  the  final  adoption  of 
the  Constitutional  Amendment.  It  would  have  been 
a  happy  thing  if  the  work  of  restoring  peace  could  have 
lain  with  a  statesman  whose  rare  aberrations  from  the 
path  of  practical  politics  were  of  this  kind.  Yet, 
considering  the  natural  passions  which  even  in  this  least 
revengeful  of  civil  wars  could  not  quite  be  repressed,  we 
should  be  judging  the  Congress  of  that  day  by  a  higher 
standard  than  we  should  apply  in  other  countries  if  we 
regarded  this  proposal  as  one  that  could  have  been 
hopefully  submitted  to  them.  Lincoln's  illusions  were 
dispelled  on  the  following  day  when  he  read  what  he  had 


432  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

written  to  his  Cabinet,  and  found  that  even  among  his 
own  ministers  not  one  man  supported  him.  It  would 
have  been  worse  than  useless  to  put  forward  his  pro 
posals  and  to  fail.  "  You  are  all  opposed  to  me,"  he 
said  sadly  ;  and  he  put  his  papers  away.  But  the  war 
had  now  so  far  progressed  that  it  is  necessary  to  turn 
back  to  the  point  at  which  we  left  it  at  the  end  of  1864. 

Winter  weather  brought  a  brief  pause  to  the  operations 
of  the  armies.  Sherman  at  Savannah  was  preparing  to 
begin  his  northward  march,  a  harder  matter,  owing  to 
the  rivers  and  marshes  that  lay  in  his  way,  than  his 
triumphal  progress  from  Atlanta.  Efforts  were  made  to 
concentrate  all  available  forces  against  him  at  Augusta 
to  his  north-west.  Making  feints  against  Augusta  on 
the  one  side,  and  ,against  the  city  and  port  of  Charleston 
on  the  other,  he  displayed  the  marvellous  engineering 
capacity  of  his  army  by  an  advance  of  unlocked  for 
speed  across  the  marshes  to  Columbia,  due  north  of  him, 
which  is  the  State  capital  of  South  Carolina.  He  reached 
it  on  February  17,  1865.  The  intended  concentration  of 
the  South  at  Augusta  was  broken  up.  The  retreating 
Confederates  set  fire  to  great  stores  of  cotton  and  the 
unfortunate  city  was  burnt,  a  calamity  for  which  the 
South,  by  a  natural  but  most  unjust  mistake,  blamed 
Sherman.  The  railway  communications  of  Charleston 
were  now  certain  to  be  severed  ;  so  the  Confederates 
were  forced  to  evacuate  it,  and  on  February  18, 1865,  the 
North  occupied  the  chief  home  of  the  misbegotten 
political  ideals  of  the  South  and  of  its  real  culture  and 
chivalry. 

Admiral  Porter  (for  age  and  ill-health  had  come  upon 
Farragut)  was  ready  at  sea  to  co-operate  with  Sherman. 
Thomas's  army  in  Tennessee  had  not  been  allowed  by 
Grant  to  go  into  winter  quarters.  A  part  of  it  under 
Schofield  was  brought  to  Washington  and  there  shipped 
for  North  Carolina,  where,  ever  since  Burnside's  success 
ful  expedition  in  1862,  the  Union  Government  had  held 
the  ports  north  of  Wilmington.  Wilmington  itself  was 
the  only  port  left  to  the  South,  and  Richmond  had  now 
come  to  depend  largely  on  the  precarious  and  costly 


THE  END  433 

supplies  which  could  still,  notwithstanding  the  blockade, 
be  run  into  that  harbour.  At  the  end  of  December, 
Butler,  acting  in  flagrant  disobedience  to  Grant,  had 
achieved  his  crowning  failure  in  a  joint  expedition 
with  Porter  against  Wilmington.  But  Porter  was  not 
discouraged,  nor  was  Grant,  who  from  beginning  to  end 
of  his  career  had  worked  well  together  with  the  Navy. 
On  February  8,  Porter,  this  time  supported  by  an  ener- 

f^tic  general,  Terry,  effected  a  brilliant  capture  of  Fort 
isher  at  the  mouth  of  Wilmington  harbour.     The  port 
was  closed  to  the  South.     On  the  22nd,  the  city  itself  fell 
to  Schofield,  and  Sherman  had  now  this  sea  base  at  hand 
if  he  needed  it. 

Meanwhile  Grant's  entrenchments  on  the  east  of 
Richmond  and  Petersburg  were  still  extending  south 
ward,  and  Lee's  defences  had  been  stretched  till  they 
covered  nearly  forty  miles.  Grant's  lines  now  cut  the 
principal  railway  southward  from  the  huge  fortress, 
and  he  was  able  effectually  to  interrupt  communication 
by  road  to  the  south-west.  There  could  be  little  doubt 
that  Richmond  would  fall  soon,  and  the  real  question  was 
coming  to  be  whether  Lee  and  his  army  could  escape 
from  Richmond  and  still  carry  on  the  war. 

The  appointment  of  Lee  as  General-in-Chief  was  not 
too  late  to  bear  one  consequence  which  may  have 
prolonged  the  war  a  little.  Joseph  Johnston,  whose 
ability  in  a  campaign  of  constant  retirement  before 
overwhelming  force  had  been  respected  and  redoubted 
by  Sherman,  had  been  discarded  by  Davis  in  the  previous 
July.  He  was  now  put  in  command  of  the  forces  which 
it  was  hoped  to  concentrate  against  Sherman,  with  a 
view  to  holding  up  his  northward  advance  and  preventing 
him  from .  joining  hands  with  Lee  before  Richmond. 
There  were  altogether  about  89,000  Confederate  troops 
scattered  in  the  Carolinas,  Georgia,  and  Florida,  and 
there  would  be  about  the  same  number  under  Sherman 
when  Schofield  in  North  Carolina  could  join  him,  but 
the  number  which  Johnston  could  now  collect  together 
seems  never  to  have  exceeded  33,000.  It  was  Sherman's 
task  by  the  rapidity  of  his  movements  to  prevent  a  very 


434  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

formidable  concentration  against  him.  Johnston  on  the 
other  hand  must  hinder  if  he  could  Sherman's  junction 
with  Schofield.  Just  before  that  junction  took  place  he 
narrowly  missed  dealing  a  considerable  blow  to  Sher 
man's  army  at  the  battle  of  Bentonville  in  the  heart  of 
North  Carolina,  but  had  in  the  end  to  withdraw  within  an 
entrenched  position  where  Sherman  would  not  attack 
him,  but  which  upon  the  arrival  of  Schofield  he  was 
forced  to  abandon.  On  March  23,  1865,  Sherman  took 
possession  of  the  town  and  railway  junction  of  Golds- 
borough  between  Raleigh  and  New  Berne.  From  Savan 
nah  to  Goldsborough  he  had  led  his  army  425  miles  in 
fifty  days,  amid  disadvantages  of  ground  and  of  weather 
which  had  called  forth  both  extraordinary  endurance  and 
mechanical  skill  on  the  part  of  his  men.  He  lay  now 
140  miles  south  of  Petersburg  by  the  railway.  The  port 
of  New  Berne  to  the  east  of  him  on  the  estuary  of  the 
Neuse  gave  him  a  sure  base  of  supplies,  and  would  enable 
him  quickly  to  move  his  army  by  sea  to  Petersburg  and 
Richmond  if  Grant  should  so  decide.  The  direction  in 
which  Johnston  would  now  fall  back  lay  inland  up  the 
Neuse  Valley,  also  along  a  railway,  towards  Greens- 
borough  some  150  miles  south-west  of  Petersburg ; 
Greensborough  was  connected  by  another  railway  with 
Petersburg  and  Richmond,  and  along  this  line  Lee  might 
attempt  to  retire  and  join  him. 

All  this  time  whatever  designs  Lee  had  of  leaving 
Richmond  were  suspended  because  the  roads  in  that 
weather  were  too  bad  for  his  transport ;  and,  while  of 
necessity  he  waited,  his  possible  openings  narrowed. 
Philip  Sheridan  had  now  received  the  coveted  rank  of 
Major-General,  which  McClellan  had  resigned  on  the  day 
on  which  he  was  defeated  for  the  Presidency.  The 
North  delighted  to  find  in  his  achievements  the  dashing 
quality  which  appeals  to  civilian  imagination,  and  Grant 
now  had  in  him,  as  well  as  in  Sherman,  a  lieutenant  who 
would  faithfully  make  his  chief's  purposes  his  own,  and 
who  would  execute  them  with  independent  decision. 
The  cold,  in  which  his  horses  suffered,  had  driven 
Sheridan  into  winter  quarters,  but  on  February  27  he 


THE   END  435 

was  able  to  start  up  the  Shenandoah  Valley  again  with 
10,000  cavalry.  Most  of  the  Confederate  cavalry  under 
Early  had  now  been  dispersed,  mainly  for  want  of  forage 
in  the  desolated  valley  ;  the  rest  were  now  dispersed  by 
Sheridan,  and  the  greater  part  of  Early's  small  force  oi 
infantry  with  all  his  artillery  were  captured.  There 
was  a  garrison  in  Lynchburg,  80  or  90  miles  west  of 
Richmond,  which  though  strong  enough  to  prevent 
Sheridan's  cavalry  from  capturing  that  place  was  not 
otherwise  of  account ;  but  there  was  no  Confederate  force 
in  the  field  except  Johnston's  men  near  enough  to  co 
operate  with  Lee ;  only  some  small  and  distant  armies, 
hundreds  of  miles  away  with  the  railway  communication 
between  them  and  the  East  destroyed.  Sheridan  now 
broke  up  the  railway  and  canal  communication  on  the 
north-west  side  of  Richmond.  He  was  to  have  gone  on 
south  and  eventually  joined  Sherman  if  he  could  ;  but, 
finding  himself  stopped  for  the  time  by  floods  in  the  upper 
valley  of  the  James,  he  rode  past  the  north  of  Richmond, 
and  on  March  19  joined. Grant,  to  put  his  cavalry  and 
brains  at  his  service  when  Grant  judged  that  the  moment 
for  his  final  effort  had  come. 

On  March  4,  1865,  Abraham  Lincoln  took  office  for  the 
second  time  as  President  of  the  United  States.  There 
was  one  new  and  striking  feature  in  the  simple  cere 
monial,  the  presence  of  a  battalion  of  negro  troops  in  his 
escort.  This  time,  though  he  would  say  no  sanguine 
word,  it  cannot  have  been  a  long  continuance  of  war  that 
filled  his  thoughts,  but  the  scarcely  less  difficult  though 
far  happier  task  of  restoring  the  fabric  of  peaceful 
society  in  the  conquered  South.  His  difficulties  were 
now  likely  to  come  from  the  North  no  less  than  the  South. 
Tentative  proposals  which  he  had  once  or  twice  made 
suggest  the  spirit  in  which  he  would  have  felt  his  way 
along  this  new  path.  In  the  inaugural  address  which  he 
now  delivered  that  spirit  is  none  the  less  perceptible 
because  he  spoke  of  the  past.  The  little  speech  at 
Gettysburg,  with  its  singular  perfection  of  form,  and  the 
"  Second  Inaugural "  are  the  chief  outstanding  examples 
of  his  peculiar  oratorical  power.  The  comparative  rank 


436  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

of  his  oratory  need  not  be  discussed,  for  at  any  rate  it 
was  individual  and  unlike  that  of  most  other  great 
speakers  in  history,  though  perhaps  more  like  that  of 
some  great  speeches  in  drama. 

But  there  is  a  point  of  some  moment  in  which  the 
Second  Inaugural  does  invite  a  comment,  and  a  comment 
which  should  be  quite  explicit.  Probably  no  other  speech 
of  a  modern  statesman  uses  so  unreservedly  the  language 
of  intense  religious  feeling.  The  occasion  made  it  natural ; 
neither  the  thought  nor  the  words  are  in  any  way 
conventional ;  no  sensible  reader  now  could  entertain 
a  suspicion  that  the  orator  spoke  to  the  heart  of  the 
people  but  did  not  speak  from  his  own  heart.  But  an  old 
Illinois  attorney,  who  thought  he  knew  the  real  Lincoln 
behind  the  President,  might  have  wondered  whether  the 
real  Lincoln  spoke  here.  For  Lincoln's  religion,  like 
everything  else  in  his  character,  became,  when  he  was 
famous,  a  stock  subject  of  discussion  among  his  old 
associates.  Many  said  "  he  was  a  Christian  but  did  not 
know  it."  Some  hinted,  with  an  air  of  great  sagacity, 
that  "  so  far  from  his  being  a  Christian  or  a  religious  man, 
the  less  said  about  it  the  better."  In  early  manhood 
he  broke  away  for  ever  from  the  scheme  of  Christian 
theology  which  was  probably  more  or  less  common  to 
the  very  various  Churches  which  surrounded  him.  He 
had  avowed  this  sweeping  denial  with  a  freedom  which 
pained  some  friends,  perhaps  rather  by  its  rashness  than 
by  its  impiety,  and  he  was  apt  to  regard  the  procedure  of 
theologians  as  a  blasphemous  twisting  of  the  words  of 
Christ.  He  rejected  that  belief  in  miracles  and  in  the 
literally  inspired  accuracy  of  the  Bible  narrative  which 
was  no  doubt  held  as  fundamental  by  all  these  Churches. 
He  rejected  no  less  any  attempt  to  substitute  for  this 
foundation  the  belief  in  any  priestly  authority  or  in  the 
authority  of  any  formal  and  earthly  society  called  the 
Church.  With  this  total  independence  of  the  expressed 
creeds  of  his  neighbours  he  still  went  and  took  his  boys 
to  Presbyterian  public  worship — their  mother  was  an 
Episcopalian  and  his  own  parents  had  been  Baptists. 
He  loved  the  Bible  and  knew  it  intimately — he  is  said 


THE  END  437 

also  by  the  way  to  have  stored  in  his  memory  a  large 
number  of  hymns.  In  the  year  before  his  death  he 
wrote  to  Speed :  "  I  am  profitably  engaged  in  reading 
the  Bible.  Take  all  of  this  book  upon  reason  that  you 
can  and  the  balance  upon  faith  and  you  will  live  and  die 
a  better  man."  It  was  not  so  much  the  Old  Testament 
as  the  New  Testament  and  what  he  called  "  the  true 
spirit  of  Christ  "  that  he  loved  especially,  and  took  with 
all  possible  seriousness  as  the  rule  of  life.  His  theology, 
in  the  narrower  sense,  may  be  said  to  have  been  limited 
to  an  intense  belief  in  a  vast  and  over-ruling  Providence 
— the  lighter  forms  of  superstitious  feelings  which  he  is 
known  to  have  had  in  common  with  most  frontiersmen 
were  apparently  of  no  importance  in  his  life.  And  this 
Providence,  darkly  spoken  of,  was  certainly  conceived 
by  him  as  intimately  and  kindly  related  to  his  own  life. 
In  his  Presidential  candidature,  when  he  owned  to  some 
one  that  the  opposition  of  clergymen  hurt  him  deeply,  he 
is  said  to  have  confessed  to  being  no  Christian  and  to 
have  continued,  "  I  know  that  there  is  a  God  and  that 
He  hates  injustice  and  slavery.  I  see  the  storm  coming 
and  I  know  that  His  hand  is  in  it.  If  He  has  a  place  and 
work  for  me,  and  I  think  He  has,  I  believe  I  am  ready. 
I  am  nothing,  but  truth  is  everything  ;  I  know  I  am 
right  because  I  know  that  liberty  is  right,  for  Christ 
teaches  it,  and  Christ  is  God.  I  have  told  them  that  a 
house  divided  against  itself  cannot  stand,  and  Christ  and 
reason  say  the  same,  and  they  will  find  it  so."  When 
old  acquaintances  said  that  he  had  no  religion  they  based 
their  opinion  on  such  remarks  as  that  the  God,  of  whom 
he  had  just  been  speaking  solemnly,  was  "  not  a  person." 
It  would  be  unprofitable  to  inquire  what  he,  and  many 
others,  meant  by  this  expression,  but,  later  at  any  rate, 
this  "  impersonal "  power  was  one  with  which  he  could 
hold  commune.  His  robust  intellect,  impatient  of 
unproved  assertion,  was  unlikely  to  rest  in  the  common 
assumption  that  things  dimly  seen  may  be  treated  as  not 
being  there.  So  humorous  a  man  was  also  unlikely  to  be 
too  conceited  to  say  his  prayers.  At  any  rate  he  said 
them  ;  said  them  intently  ;  valued  the  fact  that  others 


438  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

prayed  for  him  and  for  the  nation  ;  and,  as  in  official 
Proclamations  (concerning  days  of  national  religious 
observance)  he  could  wield,  like  no  other  modern 
writer,  the  language  of  the  Prayer  Book,  so  he  would 
speak  of  prayer  without  the  smallest  embarrassment  in 
talk  with  a  general  or  a  statesman.  It  is  possible  that 
this  was  a  development  of  later  years.  Lincoln  did  not, 
like  most  of  us,  arrest  his  growth.  To  Mrs.  Lincoln  it 
seemed  that  with  the  death  of  their  child,  Willie,  a 
change  came  over  his  whole  religious  outlook.  It  well 
might ;  and  since  that  grief,  which  came  while  his 
troubles  were  beginning,  much  else  had  come  to  Lincoln  ; 
and  now  through  four  years  of  unsurpassed  trial  his 
capacity  had  steadily  grown,  and  his  delicate  fairness, 
his  pitifulness,  his  patience,  his  modesty  had  grown 
therewith.  Here  is  one  of  the  few  speeches  ever 
delivered  by  a  great  man  at  the  crisis  of  his  fate  on  the 
sort  of  occasion  which  a  tragedian  telling  his  story  would 
have  devised  for  him.  This  man  had  stood  alone  in  the 
dark.  He  had  done  justice  ;  he  had  loved  mercy  ;  he 
had  walked  humbly  with  his  God.  The  reader  to  whom 
religious  utterance  makes  little  appeal  will  not  suppose 
that  his  imaginative  words  stand  for  no  real  experience. 
The  reader  whose  piety  knows  no  questions  will  not  be 
pained  to  think  that  this  man  had  professed  no  faith. 

He  said,  "  Fellow  Countrymen :  At  this  second 
appearance  to  take  the  oath  of  the  Presidential  office, 
there  is  less  occasion  for  an  extended  address  than  there 
was  at  the  first.  Then  a  statement,  somewhat  in  detail, 
of  a  course  to  be  pursued,  seemed  fitting  and  proper. 
Now,  at  the  expiration  of  four  years,  during  which  public 
declarations  have  been  constantly  called  forth  on  every 
point  and  phase  of  the  great  contest  which  still  absorbs 
the  energies  and  engrosses  the  attention  of  the  nation, 
little  that  is  new  could  be  presented.  The  progress  of 
our  arms,  upon  which  all  else  chiefly  depends,  is  as  well 
known  to  the  public  as  to  myself  ;  and  it  is,  I  trust, 
reasonably  satisfactory  and  encouraging  to  all.  With 
high  hope  for  the  future,  no  prediction  in  regard  to  it  is 
ventured. 


THE   END  439 

"  On  the  occasion  corresponding  to  this  four  years  ago, 
all  thoughts  were  anxiously  directed  to  an  impending 
civil  war.  All  dreaded  it — all  sought  to  avert  it.  While 
the  inaugural  address  was  being  delivered  from  this 
place,  devoted  altogether  to  saving  the  Union  without 
war,  insurgent  agents  were  in  the  city  seeking  to  destroy 
it  without  war — seeking  to  dissolve  the  Union  and  divide 
effects,  by  negotiation.  Both  parties  deprecated  war  ; 
but  one  of  them  would  make  war  rather  than  let  the 
nation  survive  ;  and  the  other  would  accept  war  rather 
than  let  it  perish.  And  the  war  came. 

"  One-eighth  of  the  whole  population  were  coloured 
slaves,  not  distributed  generally  over  the  Union,  but 
localised  in  the  Southern  part  of  it.  These  slaves 
constituted  a  peculiar  and  powerful  interest.  All  knew 
that  this  interest  was,  somehow,  the  cause  of  the  war. 
To  strengthen,  perpetuate,  and  extend  this  interest  was 
the  object  for  which  the  insurgents  would  rend  the 
Union,  even  by  war  ;  while  the  Government  claimed  no 
right  to  do  more  than  to  restrict  the  territorial  enlarge 
ment  of  it.  Neither  party  expected  for  the  war  the 
magnitude  or  the  duration  which  it  has  already  attained. 
Neither  expected  that  the  cause  of  the  conflict  might 
cease  with,  or  even  before,  the  conflict  itself  should  cease. 
Each  looked  for  an  easier  triumph,  and  a  result  less 
fundamental  and  astounding.  Both  read  the  same 
Bible,  and  pray  to  the  same  God  ;  and  each  invokes  His 
aid  against  the  other.  It  may  seem  strange  that  any 
men  should  dare  to  ask  a  just  God's  assistance  in  wringing 
their  bread  from  the  sweat  of  other  men's  faces  ;  but  let 
us  judge  not,  that  we  be  not  judged.  The  prayers  of 
both  could  not  be  answered — that  of  neither  has  been 
answered  fully.  The  Almighty  has  His  own  purposes. 
6  Woe  unto  the  world  because  of  offenses  !  for  it  must 
needs  be  that  offenses  come  ;  but  woe  to  that  man  by 
whom  the  offense  cometh.'  If  we  shall  suppose  that 
American  slavery  is  one  of  those  offenses,  which,  in  the 
providence  of  God,  must  needs  come,  but  which,  having 
continued  through  His  appointed  time,  He  now  wills  to 
remove,  and  that  He  gives  to  both  North  and  South  this 


440  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

terrible  war,  as  the  woe  due  to  those  by  whom  the  offense 
came,  shall  we  discern  therein  any  departure  from  those 
divine  attributes  which  the  believers  in  a  living  God 
always  ascribe  to  Him  ?  Fondly  do  we  hope — fervently 
do  we  pray — that  this  mighty  scourge  of  war  may 
speedily  pass  away.  Yet,  if  God  wills  that  it  continue 
until  all  the  wealth  piled  by  the  bondman's  two  hundred 
and  fifty  years  of  unrequited  toil  shall  be  sunk,  and  until 
every  drop  of  blood  drawn  with  the  lash  shall  be  paid 
with  another  drawn  with  the  sword,  as  was  said  three 
thousand  years  ago,  so  still  it  must  be  said,  c  The  judg 
ments  of  the  Lord  are  true  and  righteous  altogether.' 

"  With  malice  toward  none  ;  with  charity  for  all ; 
with  firmness  in  the  right,  as  God  gives  us  to  see  the 
right,  let  us  strive  on  to  finish  the  work  we  are  in  ;  to 
bind  up  the  nation's  wounds,  to  care  for  him  who  shall 
have  borne  the  battle,  and  for  his  widow,  and  his 
orphan — to  do  all  which  may  achieve  and  cherish  a  just 
.and  lasting  peace  among  ourselves,  and  with  all  nations." 
Lincoln's  own  commentary  may  follow  upon  his  speech : 
"March  15,  1865.  Dear  Mr.  Weed, — Everyone  likes 
a  little  compliment.  Thank  you  for  yours  on  my  little 
notification  speech  and  on  the  recent  inaugural  address. 
I  expect  the  latter  to  wear  as  well  as — perhaps  better 
than — anything  I  have  produced  ;  but  I  believe  it  is 
not  immediately  popular.  Men  are  not  flattered  by 
being  shown  that  there  has  been  a  difference  of  purpose 
between  the  Almighty  and  them.  To  deny  it  however 
in  this  case  is  to  deny  that  there  is  a  God  governing  the 
world.  It  is  a  truth  which  I  thought  needed  to  be  told, 
and,  as  whatever  of  humiliation  there  is  in  it  falls  most 
directly  on  myself,  I  thought  others  might  afford  for  me 
to  tell  it. 

"  Truly  yours, 

"  A.  LINCOLN." 

On  March  20,  1865,  a  period  of  bright  sunshine  seems 
to  have  begun  in  Lincoln's  life.  Robert  Lincoln  had 
some  time  before  finished  his  course  at  Harvard,  and  his 
father  had  written  to  Grant  modestly  asking  him  if  he 


THE  END  441 

could  suggest  the  way,  accordant  with  discipline  and 
good  example,  in  which  the  young  man  could  best  see 
something  of  military  life .  Grant  immediately  had  him  on 
to  his  staff,  with  a  commission  as  captain,  and  now  Grant 
invited  Lincoln  to  come  to  his  headquarters  for  a  holiday 
visit.  There  was  much  in  it  besides  holiday,  for  Grant 
was  rapidly  maturing  his  plans  for  the  great  event  and 
wanted  Lincoln  near.  Moreover  Sheridan  had  just 
arrived,  and  while  Lincoln  was  there  Sherman  came  from 
Goldsborough  with  Admiral  Porter  for  consultation  as 
to  Sherman's  next  move.  Peremptory  as  he  was  in  any 
necessary  political  instructions,  Lincoln  was  now  happy 
to  say  nothing  of  military  matters,  beyond  expressing 
his  earnest  desire  that  the  final  overmastering  of  the 
Confederate  armies  should  be  accomplished  with  the 
least  further  bloodshed  possible,  and  indulging  the 
curiosity  that  any  other  guest  might  have  shown.  A 
letter  home  to  Mrs.  Lincoln  betrays  the  interest  with 
which  he  heard  heavy  firing  quite  near,  which  seemed  to 
him  a  great  battle,  but  did  not  excite  those  who  knew. 
Then  there  were  rides  in  the  country  with  Grant's  staff. 
Lincoln  in  his  tall  hat  and  frock  coat  was  a  marked  and 
curious  figure  on  a  horse.  He  had  once,  by  the  way, 
insisted  on  riding  with  Butler,  catechising  him  with 
remorseless  chaff  on  engineering  matters  and  forbidding 
his  chief  engineer  to  prompt  him,  along  six  miles  of 
cheering  Northern  troops  within  easy  sight  and  shot  of 
the  Confederate  soldiers  to  whom  his  hat  and  coat 
identified  him.  But,  however  odd  a  figure,  he  impressed 
Grant's  officers  as  a  good  and  bold  horseman.  Then, 
after  Sherman's  arrival,  there  evidently  was  no  end  of 
talk.  Sherman  was  at  first  amused  by  the  President's 
anxiety  as  to  whether  his  army  was  quite  safe  without 
him  at  Goldsborough  ;  but  that  keen-witted  soldier  soon 
received,  as  he  has  said,  an  impression  both  of  goodness 
and  of  greatness  such  as  no  other  man  ever  gave  him. 

What  especially  remained  on  Sherman's  and  on  Porter's 
mind  was  the  recollection  of  Lincoln's  overpowering 
desire  for  mercy  and  for  conciliation  with  the  conquered. 
Indeed  Sherman  blundered  later  in  the  terms  he  first 


442  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

accepted  from  Johnston  ;  for  he  did  not  see  that  Lincoln's 
clemency  for  Southern  leaders  and  desire  for  the  welfare 
of  the  South  included  no  mercy  at  all  for  the  political 
principle  of  the  Confederacy.  Grant  was  not  exposed 
to  any  such  mistake,  for  a  week  or  two  before  Lee  had 
made  overtures  to  him  for  some  sort  of  conference  and 
Lincoln  had  instantly  forbidden  him  to  confer  with  Lee 
for  any  purpose  but  that  of  his  unconditional  surrender. 
What,  apart  from  the  reconstruction  of  Southern  life 
and  institutions,  was  in  part  weighing  with  Lincoln  was 
the  question  of  punishments  for  rebellion.  By  Act  of 
Congress  the  holders  of  high  political  and  military 
office  in  the  South  were  liable  as  traitors,  and  there  was 
now  talk  of  hanging  in  the  North.  Later  events  showed 
that  a  very  different  sentiment  would  make  itself  heard 
when  the  victory  came  ;  but  Lincoln  was  much  con 
cerned.  To  some  one  who  spoke  to  him  of  this  matter 
he  exclaimed,  "  What  have  I  to  do  with  you,  ye  sons  of 
Zeruiah,  that  ye  should  this  day  be  adversaries  unto  me  ? 
Shall  there  any  man  be  put  to  death  this  day  in  Israel  ?  " 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  prerogative  of  mercy 
would  have  been  vigorously  used  in  his  hands,  but  he  did 
not  wish  for  a  conflict  on  this  matter  at  all ;  and  Grant 
was  taught,  in  a  parable  about  a  teetotal  Irishman  who 
forgave  being  served  with  liquor  unbeknownst  to  himself, 
that  zeal  in  capturing  Jefferson  Davis  and  his  colleagues 
was  not  expected  of  him. 

While  Lincoln  was  at  Grant's  headquarters  at  City 
Point,  Lee,  hoping  to  recover  the  use  of  the  roads  to  the 
south-west,  endeavoured  to  cause  a  diversion  of  the 
besiegers'  strength  by  a  sortie  on  his  east  front.  It 
failed  and  gave  the  besiegers  a  further  point  of  vantage. 
On  April  I  Sheridan  was  sent  far  round  the  south  of 
Lee's  lines,  and  in  a  battle  at  a  point  called  Five  Forks 
established  himself  in  possession  of  the  railway  running 
due  west  from  Petersburg.  The  defences  were  weakest 
on  this  side,  and  to  prevent  the  entrance  of  the  enemy 
there  Lee  was  bound  to  withdraw  troops  from  other 
quarters.  On  the  two  following  days  Grant's  army 
delivered  assaults  at  several  points  on  the  east  side  of 


THE  END  443 

the  Petersburg  defences,  penetrating  the  outer  lines  and 
pushing  on  against  the  inner  fortifications  of  the  town. 
On  Sunday,  April  2,  Jefferson  Davis  received  in  church 
word  from  Lee  to  make  instant  preparation  for  departure, 
as  Petersburg  could  not  be  held  beyond  that  night  and 
Richmond  must  fall  immediately.  That  night  the 
Confederate  Government  left  the  capital,  and  Lee's 
evacuation  of  the  fortress  began  the  next  day.  Lincoln 
was  sent  for.  He  came  by  sea,  and  to  the  astonishment 
and  alarm  of  the  naval  officers  made  his  way  at  once  to 
Richmond  with  entirely  insufficient  escort.  There  he 
strolled  about,  hand  in  hand  with  his  little  son  Tad, 
greeted  by  exultant  negroes,  and  stared  at  by  angry  or 
curious  Confederates,  while  he  visited  the  former  prison 
of  the  Northern  prisoners  and  other  places  of  more 
pleasant  attraction  without  receiving  any  annoyance 
from  the  inhabitants.  He  had  an  interesting  talk  with 
Campbell,  formerly  a  Supreme  Court  judge,  and  a  few 
weeks  back  one  of  Davis5  commissioners  at  Hampton 
Roads.  Campbell  obtained  permission  to  convene  a 
meeting  of  the  members  of  the  Virginia  Legislature  with 
a  view  to  speedier  surrender  by  Lee's  army.  But  the 
permission  was  revoked,  for  he  somewhat  clumsily 
mistook  its  terms,  and,  moreover,  the  object  in  view  had 
meantime  been  accomplished. 

Jefferson  Davis  was  then  making  his  way  with  his 
ministers  to  Johnston's  army.  When  they  arrived  he 
and  they  held  council  with  Johnston  and  Beauregard. 
He  would  issue  a  Proclamation  which  would  raise  him 
many  soldiers  and  he  would  "  whip  them  yet."  No  one 
answered  him.  At  last  he  asked  the  opinion  of  John 
ston,  who  bluntly  undeceived  him  as  to  facts,  and  told 
him  that  further  resistance  would  be  a  crime,  and  got  his 
permission  to  treat  with  Sherman,  while  the  fallen 
Confederate  President  escaped  further  south. 

Lee's  object  was  to  make  his  way  along  the  north  side 
of  the  Appomattox  River,  which  flows  east  through 
Petersburg  to  the  James  estuary,  and  at  a  certain  point 
strike  southwards  towards  Johnston's  army.  He  fought 
for  his  escape  with  all  his  old  daring  and  skill,  while 


444  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

hardly  less  vigorous  and  skilful  efforts  were  made  not 
only  to  pursue,  but  to  surround  him.  Grant  in  his  pur 
suit  sent  letters  of  courteous  entreaty  that  he  would 
surrender  and  spare  further  slaughter.  Northern  cavalry 
got  ahead  of  Lee,  tearing  up  the  railway  lines  he  had 
hoped  to  use  and  blocking  possible  mountain  passes ;  and 
his  supply  trains  were  being  cut  off.  After  a  long  running 
fight  and  one  last  fierce  battle  on  April  6,  at  a  place  called 
Sailor's  Creek,  Lee  found  himself  on  April  9  at  Appomattox 
Court  House,  some  seventy  miles  west  of  Petersburg,  sur 
rounded  beyond  hope  of  escape.  On  that  day  he  and 
Grant  with  their  staffs  met  in  a  neighbouring  farmhouse. 
Those  present  recalled  afterwards  the  contrast  of  the 
stately  Lee  and  the  plain,  ill-dressed  Grant  arriving 
mud-splashed  in  his  haste.  Lee  greeted  Meade  as  an  old 
acquaintance  and  remarked  how  grey  he  had  grown 
with  years.  Meade  gracefully  replied  that  Lee  and  not 
age  was  responsible  for  that.  Grant  had  started  "  quite 
jubilant  "  on  the  news  that  Lee  was  ready  to  surrender, 
but  in  presence  of  "  the  downfall  of  a  foe  who  had  fought 
so  long  and  valiantly  "  he  fell  into  sadness.  Pleasant 
"  talk  of  old  army  times  "  followed,  and  he  had  almost 
forgotten,  as  he  declares,  the  business  in  hand,  when  Lee 
asked  him  on  what  terms  he  would  accept  surrender. 
Grant  sat  down  and  wrote,  not  knowing  when  he  began 
what  he  should  go  on  to  write.  As  he  wrote  he  thought 
of  the  handsome  sword  Lee  carried.  Instantly  he 
added  to  his  terms  permission  for  every  Southern  officer 
to  keep  his  sword  and  his  horse.  Lee  read  the  paper  and 
when  he  came  to  that  point  was  visibly  moved.  He 
gauged  his  man,  and  he  ventured  to  ask  something  more. 
He  thought,  he  said,  Grant  might  not  know  that  the 
Confederate  cavalry  troopers  owned  their  own  horses. 
Grant  said  they  would  be  badly  wanted  on  the  farms 
and  added  a  further  concession  accordingly.  "  This 
will  have  the  best  possible  effect  on  the  men,"  said  Lee. 
".It  will  do  much  towards  conciliating  our  people." 
Grant  included  also  in  his  written  terms  words  of  general 
pardon  to  Confederate  officers  for  their  treason.  This 
was  an  inadvertent  breach,  perhaps,  of  Lincoln's  orders, 


THE  END  445 

but  it  was  one  which  met  with  no  objection.  Lee  retired 
into  civil  life  and  devoted  himself  thereafter  to  his 
neighbours'  service  as  head  of  a  college  in  Virginia — 
much  respected,  very  free  with  alms  to  old  soldiers  and 
not  much  caring  whether  they  had  fought  for  the  South 
or  for  the  North.  Grant  did  not  wait  to  set  foot  in  the 
capital  which  he  had  conquered,  but,  the  main  business 
being  over,  posted  off  with  all  haste  to  see  his  son  settled 
in  at  school. 

Lincoln  remained  at  City  Point  till  April  8,  when  he 
started  back  by  steamer.  Those  who  were  with  him  on 
the  two  days'  voyage  told  afterwards  of  the  happy  talk, 
as  of  a  quiet  family  party  rejoicing  in  the  return  of 
peace.  Somebody  said  that  Jefferson  Davis  really  ought 
to  be  hanged.  The  reply  came  in  the  quotation  that  he 
might  almost  have  expected,  "  Judge  not,  that  ye  be  not 
judged."  On  the  second  day,  Sunday,  the  President 
read  to  them  parts  of  "  Macbeth."  Sumner,  who  was 
one  of  them,  recalled  that  he  read  twice  over  the  lines, 

"  Duncan  is  in  his  grave ; 
After  life's  fitful  fever  he  sleeps  well ; 
Treason  has  done  his  worst ;  nor  steel,  nor  poison, 
Malice  domestic,  foreign  levy,  nothing 
Can  touch  him  further." 

On  the  Tuesday,  April  II,  a  triumphant  crowd  came 
to  the  White  House  to  greet  Lincoln.  He  made  them  a 
speech,  carefully  prepared  in  substance  rather  than  in 
form,  dealing  with  the  question  of  reconstruction  in  the 
South,  with  special  reference  to  what  was  already  in 
progress  in  Louisiana.  The  precise  points  of  controversy 
that  arose  in  this  regard  hardly  matter  now.  Lincoln 
disclaimed  any  wish  to  insist  pedantically  upon  any 
detailed  plan  of  his  ;  but  he  declared  his  wish  equally  to 
keep  clear  of  any  merely  pedantic  points  of  controversy 
with  any  in  the  South  who  were  loyally  striving  to  revive 
State  Government  with  acceptance  of  the  Union  and 
without  slavery  ;  and  he  urged  that  genuine  though 
small  beginnings  should  be  encouraged.  He  regretted 
that  in  Louisiana  his  wish  for  the  enfranchisement  of 


446  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

educated  negroes  and  of  negro  soldiers  had  not  been 
followed ;  but  as  the  freedom  of  the  negroes  was 
unreservedly  accepted,  as  provision  was  made  for  them 
in  the  public  schools,  and  the  new  State  constitution 
allowed  the  Legislature  to  enfranchise  them,  there  was 
clear  gain.  "  Concede  that  the  new  government  of 
Louisiana  is  only  to  what  it  should  be  as  the  egg  is  to  the 
fowl,  we  shall  sooner  have  the  fowl  by  hatching  the  egg 
than  by  smashing  it.  What  has  been  said  of  Louisiana 
will  apply  generally  to  other  States.  So  new  and 
unprecedented,"  he  ended,  "  is  the  whole  case  that  no 
exclusive  and  inflexible  plan  can  safely  be  prescribed  as 
to  details  and  collaterals.  Such  exclusive  and  inflexible 
plan  would  surely  become  a  new  entanglement.  Impor 
tant  principles  may  and  must  be  inflexible.  In  the 
present  situation,  as  the  phrase  goes,  it  may  be  my  duty 
to  make  some  new  announcement  to  the  people  of  the 
South.  I  am  considering,  and  shall  not  fail  to  act  when 
satisfied  that  action  will  be  proper."  A  full  generation 
has  had  cause  to  lament  that  that  announcement  was 
never  to  be  made. 

On  Good  Friday,  April  14,  1865,  with  solemn  religious 
service  the  Union  flag  was  hoisted  again  on  Fort  Sumter 
by  General  Anderson,  its  old  defender.  On  that  morning 
there  was  a  Cabinet  Council  in  Washington.  Seward 
was  absent,  in  bed  with  an  injury  from  a  carriage  acci 
dent.  Grant  was  there  a  little  anxious  to  get  news  from 
Sherman.  Lincoln  was  in  a  happy  mood.  He  had 
earlier  that  morning  enjoyed  greatly  a  talk  with  Robert 
Lincoln  about  the  young  man's  new  experience  of 
soldiering.  He  now  told  Grant  and  the  Cabinet  that 
good  news  was  coming  from  Sherman.  He  knew  it, 
he  said,  for  last  night  he  had  dreamed  a  dream,  which 
had  come  to  him  several  times  before.  In  this  dream, 
whenever  it  came,  he  was  sailing  in  a  ship  of  a  peculiar 
build,  indescribable  but  always  the  same,  and  being 
borne  on  it  with  great  speed  towards  a  dark  and  unde 
fined  shore.  He  had  always  dreamed  this  before  victory. 
He  dreamed  it  before  Antietam,  before  Murfreesborough, 
before  Gettysburg,  before  Vicksburg.  Grant  observed 


THE  END  447 

bluntly  that  Murfreesborough  had  not  been  a  victory,  or 
of  any  consequence  any  way.  Lincoln  persisted  on  this 
topic  undeterred.  After  some  lesser  business  they  dis 
cussed  the  reconstruction  of  the  South.  Lincoln  rejoiced 
that  Congress  had  adjourned  and  the  "  disturbing 
element  "  in  it  could  not  hinder  the  work.  Before  it 
met  again,  "  if  we  are  wise  and  discreet  we  shall  re-ani 
mate  the  States  and  get  their  governments  in  successful 
operation,  with  order  prevailing  and  the  Union  re-estab 
lished."  Lastly,  there  was  talk  of  the  treatment  of 
rebels  and  of  the  demand  that  had  been  heard  for 
"  persecution  "  and  "  bloody  work."  "  No  one  need 
expect  me,"  said  Lincoln,  "  to  take  any  part  in  hanging 
or  killing  these  men,  even -the  worst  of  them.  Frighten 
them  out  of  the  country,  open  the  gates,  let  down  the 
bars,  scare  them  off."  "  Shoo,"  he  added,  throwing  up 
his  large  hands  like  a  man  scaring  sheep.  "  We  must 
extinguish  our  resentments  if  we  expect  harmony  and 
union.  There  is  too  much  of  the  desire  on  the  part  of 
some  of  our  very  good  friends  to  be  masters,  to  interfere 
with  and  dictate  to  those  States,  to  treat  the  people  not 
as  fellow  citizens  ;  there  is  too  little  respect  for  their 
rights.  I  do  not  sympathise  in  these  feelings."  Such 
was  the  tenour  of  his  last  recorded  utterance  on  public 
affairs. 

In  the  afternoon  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Lincoln  drove  together 
and  he  talked  to  her  with  keen  pleasure  of  the  life  they 
would  live  when  the  Presidency  was  over.  That  night 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Lincoln  went  to  the  theatre,  for  the  day 
was  not  observed  as  in  England.  The  Grants  were  to 
have  been  with  them,  but  changed  their  minds  and  left 
Washington  that  day,  so  a  young  officer,  Major  Rathbone, 
and  the  lady  engaged  to  him,  both  of  them  thereafter 
ill-fated,  came  instead.  The  theatre  was  crowded  ; 
many  officers  returned  from  the  war  were  there  and 
eager  to  see  Lincoln.  The  play  was  "  Our  American 
Cousin,"  a  play  in  which  the  part  of  Lord  Dundreary  was 
afterwards  developed  and  made  famous.  Some  time 
after  10  o'clock,  at  a  point  in  the  play  which  it  is  said  no 
person  present  could  afterwards  remember,  a  shot  was 


448  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

heard  in  the  theatre  and  Abraham  Lincoln  fell  forward 
upon  the  front  of  the  box  unconscious  and  dying.  A 
wild-looking  man,  who  had  entered  the  box  unobserved 
and  had  done  his  work,  was  seen  to  strike  with  a  knife 
at  Major  Rathbone,  who  tried  to  seize  him.  Then  he 
jumped  from  the  box  to  the  stage  ;  he  caught  a  spur  in 
the  drapery  and  fell,  breaking  the  small  bone  of  his  leg. 
He  rose,  shouted  "  Sic  semper  tyrannis,"  the  motto  of 
Virginia,  disappeared  behind  the  scenes,  mounted  a  horse 
that  was  in  waiting  at  the  stage  door,  and  rode  away. 

This  was  John  Wilkes  Booth,  brother  of  a  famous  actor 
then  playing  "  Hamlet  "  in  Boston.  He  was  an  actor 
too,  and  an  athletic  and  daring  youth.  In  him  that 
peculiarly  ferocious  political  passion  which  occasionally 
showed  itself  among  Southerners  was  further  inflamed 
by  brandy  and  by  that  ranting  mode  of  thought  which 
the  stage  develops  in  some  few.  He  was  the  leader  of  a 
conspiracy  which  aimed  at  compassing  the  deaths  of 
others  besides  Lincoln.  Andrew  Johnson,  the  Vice- 
President,  was  to  die.  So  was  Seward.  That  same  night 
one  of  the  conspirators,  a  gigantic  boy  of  feeble  mind, 
gained  entrance  to  Seward's  house,  and  wounded  three 
people,  including  Seward  himself,  who  was  lying  already 
injured  in  bed  and  received  four  or  five  wounds.  Neither 
he  nor  the  others  died.  The  weak-minded  or  mad  boy, 
another  man,  whose  offence  consisted  in  having  been 
asked  to  kill  Johnson  and  refused  to  do  so,  and  another 
alleged  conspirator,  a  woman,  were  hanged  after  a 
court-martial  whose  proceedings  did  credit  neither  to 
the  new  President  nor  to  others  concerned.  Booth 
himself,  after  many  adventures,  was  shot  in  a  barn  in 
which  he  stood  at  bay  and  which  had  been  set  on  fire 
by  the  soldiers  pursuing  him.  During  his  flight  he  is 
said  to  have  felt  much  aggrieved  that  men  did  not 
praise  him  as  they  had  praised  Brutus  and  Cassius. 

There  were  then  in  the  South  many  broken  and  many 
permanently  embittered  men,  indeed  the  temper  which 
would  be  glad  at  Lincoln's  death  could  be  found  here 
and  there  and  notably  among  the  partisans  of  the  South 
in  Washington.  But,  if  it  be  wondered  what  measure 


THE  END  449 

of  sympathy  there  was  for  Booth's  dark  deed,  an  answer 
lies  in  the  fact  that  the  murder  of  Lincoln  would  at  no 
time  have  been  difficult  for  a  brave  man.  Fair  blows 
were  now  as  powerless  as  foul  to  arrest  the  end.  On 
the  very  morning  when  Lincoln  and  Grant  at-  the 
Cabinet  had  been  telling  of  their  hopes  and  fears 
for  Sherman,  Sherman  himself  at  Raleigh  in  North 
Carolina  had  received  and  answered  a  letter  from 
Johnston  opening'  negotiations  for  a  peaceful  surrender. 
Three  days  later  he  was  starting  by  rail  for  Greens- 
borough  when  word  came  to  him  from  the  telegraph 
operator  that  an  important  message  was  upon  the  wire. 
He  went  to  the  telegraph  box  and  heard  it.  Then  he 
swore  the  telegraph  operator  to  secrecy,  for  he  feared 
that  some  provocation  might  lead  to  terrible  disorders 
in  Raleigh,  if  his  army,  flushed  with  triumph,  were 
to  learn,  before  his  return  in  peace,  the  news  that  for 
many  days  after  hushed  their  accustomed  songs  and 
shouts  and  cheering  into  a  silence  which  was  long 
remembered.  He  went  off  to  meet  Johnston  and  re 
quested  to  be  with  him  alone  in  a  farmhouse  near. 
There  he  told  him  of  the  murder  of  Lincoln.  "The 
perspiration  came  out  in  large  drops  on  Johnston's 
forehead,"  says  Sherman  who  watched  him  closely. 
He  exclaimed  that  it  was  a  disgrace  to  the  age.  Then 
he  asked  to  know  whether  Sherman  attributed  the 
crime  to  the  Confederate  authorities.  Sherman  could 
assure  him  that  no  one  dreamed  of  such  a  suspicion 
against  men  like  him  and  General  Lee ;  but  he  added 
that  he  was  not  so  sure  of  "  Jefferson  Davis  and  men  of 
that  stripe."  Then  followed  some  delay  through  a 
mistake  of  Sherman's  which  the  authorities  in  Washing 
ton  reversed,  but  in  a  few  days  all  was  settled  and  the 
whole  of  the  forces  under  Johnston's  command  laid 
down  their  arms.  Twenty  years  later,  as  an  old  man 
and  infirm,  their  leader  left  his  Southern  home  to  be 
present  at  Sherman's  funeral,  where  he  caught  a  chill 
from  which  he  died  soon  after.  Jefferson  Davis  was 
captured  on  May  10,  near  the  borders  of  Florida.  He 
was,  not  without  plausible  grounds  but  quite  unjustly, 


450  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

suspected  in  regard  to  the  murder,  and  he  suffered 
imprisonment  for  some  time  till  President  Andrew 
Johnson  released  him  when  the  evidence  against  him 
had  been  seen  to  be  worthless.  He  lived  many  years 
in  Mississippi  and  wrote  memoirs,  in  which  may  be 
found  the  fullest  legal  argument  for  the. great  Seces 
sion,  his  own  view  of  his  quarrels  with  Joseph 
Johnston,  and  much  besides.  Amongst  other  things 
he  tells  how  when  they  heard  the  news  of  Lincoln's 
murder  some  troops  cheered,  but  he  was  truly  sorry 
for  the  reason  that  Andrew  Johnson  was  more  hostile  to 
the  cause  than  Lincoln.  It  is  disappointing  to  think,  of 
one  who  played  a  memorable  part  in  history  with  much 
determination,  that  in  this  reminiscence  he  sized  his 
stature  as  a  man  fairly  accurately.  After  several  other 
surrenders  of  Southern  towns  and  small  scattered  forces, 
the  Confederate  General  Kirby  Smith,  in  Texas,  sur 
rendered  to  General  Canby,  Banks's  successor,  on  May  26, 
and  after  four  years  and  forty- four  days  armed  resistance 
to  the  Union  was  at  an  end. 

On  the  night  of  Good  Friday  Abraham  Lincoln  had 
been  carried  still  unconscious  to  a  house  near  the  theatre. 
His  sons  and  other  friends  were  summoned.  He  never 
regained  consciousness.  "  A  look  of  unspeakable  peace," 
say  his  secretaries  who  were  there,  "  came  over  his  worn 
features."  At  7.22  on  the  morning  of  April  15,  Stanton, 
watching  him  more  closely  than  the  rest,  told  them 
what  had  passed  in  the  words,  "  Now  he  belongs  to  the 
ages." 

The  mourning  of  a  nation,  voiced  to  later  times  by 
some  of  the  best  lines  of  more  than  one  of  its  poets, 
and  deeper  and  more  prevailing  for  the  lack  of  compre 
hension  which  some  had  shown  him  before,  followed  his 
body  in  its  slow  progress — stopping  at  Baltimore,  where 
once  his  life  had  been  threatened,  for  the  homage  of  vast 
crowds  ;  stopping  at  New  York,  where  among  the  huge 
assembly  old  General  Scott  came  to  bid  him  affectionate 
farewell ;  stopping  at  other  cities  for  the  tribute  of 
reverent  multitudes — to  Springfield,  his  home  of  so  many 
years,  where,  on  May  4,  1865,  it  was  laid  to  rest.  After 


R       o-r£»a1" 


THE  END  451 

the  burial  service  the  "  Second  Inaugural "  was  read 
over  his  grave,  nor  could  better  words  than  his  own 
have  been  chosen  to  honour  one  who  "  with  malice  toward 
none,  with  charity  toward  all,  with  firmness  in  the  , 
right  as  God  gave  him  to  see  the  right,  had  striven  on 
to  finish  the  work  that  he  was  in."  In  England,  apart 
from  more  formal  tokens  of  a  late-learnt  regard  and  an 
unfeigned  regret,  Punch  embodied  in  verse  of  rare 
felicity  the  manly  contrition  of  its  editor  for  ignorant 
derision  in  past  years ;  and  Queen  Victoria  symbolised 
best  of  all,  and  most  acceptably  to  Americans,  the 
feeling  of  her  people  when  she  wrote  to  Mrs.  Lincoln 
"  as  a  widow  to  a  widow."  Nor,  though  the  trans- . 
actions  in  which  he  bore  his  part  were  but  little  under 
stood  in  this  country  till  they  were  half  forgotten,  has 
tradition  ever  failed  to  give  him,  by  just  instinct,  his 
ntflk  with  the  greatest  of  our  race. 

/  Many  great  deeds  had  been  done  in  the  war.  The 
greatest  was  the  keeping  of  the  North  together  in  an 
enterprise  so  arduous,  and  an  enterprise  for  objects  so 
confusedly  related  as  the  Union  and  freedom.  Abraham 
Lincoln  did  this  ;  nobody  else  could  have  done  it ;  to  do 
it  he  bore  on  his  sole  shoulders  such  a  weight  of  care  and 
pain  as  few  other  men  have  borne.  When  it  was  over 
it  seemed  to  the  people  that  he  had  all  along  been  think 
ing  their  real  thoughts  for  them  ;  but  they  knew  that 
this  was  because  he  had  fearlessly  thought  for  himself. 
He  had  been  able  to  save  the  nation,  partly  because  he 
saw  that  unity  was  not  to  be  sought  by  the  way  of  base 
concession.  He  had  been  able  to  free  the  slaves,  partly 
because  he  would  not  hasten  to  this  object  at  the  sacrifice 
of  what  he  thought  a  larger  purpose.  This  most 
unrelenting  enemy  to  the  project  of  the  Confederacy 
was  the  one  man  who  had  quite  purged  his  heart  and 
mind  from  hatred  or  even  anger  towards  his  fellow- 
countrymen  of  the  South.  That  fact  came  to  be  seen 
in  the  South  too,  and  generations  in  America  are  likely 
to  remember  it  when  all  other  features  of  his  state 
craft  have  grown  indistinct.  A  thousand  reminiscences 
ludicrous  or  pathetic,  passing  into  myth  but  enshrining 


452  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

hard  fact,  will  prove  to  them  that  this  great  feature  of 
his  policy  was  a  matter  of  more  than  policy.  They  will 
remember  it  as  adding  a  peculiar  lustre  to  the' renovation 
of  their  national  existence  ;  as  no  small  part  of  the  glory, 
surpassing  that  of  former  wars,  which  has  become  the 
common  heritage  of  North  and  South.  For  perhaps  not 
many  conquerors,  and  certainly  few  successful  statesmen 
have  escaped  the  tendency  of  power  to  harden  or  at 
least  to  narrow  their  human  sympathies  ;  but  in  this  man 
a  natural  wealth  of  tender  compassion  became  richer  and 
more  tender  while  in  the  stress  of  deadly  conflict  he 
developed  an  astounding  strength. 

f  Beyond  his  own  country  some  of  us  recall  his  name  as 
the  greatest  among  those  associated  with  the  cause  of 
popular  government.     He  would  have  liked  this  tribute, 
and  the  element  of  truth  in  it  is  plain  enough,  yet  it 
demands    one    final    consideration.     He    accepted    the 
institutions  to  which  he  was  born,  and  he  enjoyed  them. 
His  own  intense  experience  of  the  weakness  of  democracy 
did  not  sour  him,  nor  would  any  similar  experience  of 
later  times  have  been  likely  to  do  so.     Yet  if  he  reflected 
much  on  forms  of  government  it  was  with  a  dominant 
interest  in  something  beyond  them.     For  he  was  a  citizen 
of  that  far  country  where  there  is  neither  aristocrat  nor 
democrat.     No  political  theory  stands  out  from  his  words 
or  actions ;    but  they  show  a  most  unusual  sense  of  the 
possible  dignity  of  common  men  and  common  things. 
His    humour    rioted    in    comparisons    between    potent 
\personages  and  Jim  Jett's  brother  or  old  Judge  Brown's 
drunken  coachman,  for  the  reason  for  which  the  rarely 
jesting    Wordsworth    found    a    hero    in    the    "Leech- 
Gatherer  "  or  in  Nelson  and  a  villain  in  Napoleon  or  in 
Peter  Bell.     He  could  use  and  respect  and  pardon  and 
overrule  his  far  more  accomplished  ministers  because  he 
stood  up]  to  them  with  no  more  fear  or  cringing,  with  no 
more  dislike  or  envy  or  disrespect  than  he  had  felt  when 
he  stood  up  long  before  to  Jack  Armstrong.     He  faced  the 
difficulties  and  terrors  of  his  high  office  with  that  same 
mind  with  which  he  had  paid  his  way  as  a  poor  man  or 
navigated  a  boat  in  rapids  or  in  floods.    IfheJi^4-^Hhcui  y* 


THE  END  453 

j of  democracy  it  was  contained  in  this  condensed  note 
|  which  he  wrote,  perhaps  as  an  autograph,  a  year  or  two 
1  before  his  Presidency  :  "  As  I  would  not  be  a  slave,  so 
\  I  would  not  be  a  master.  This  expresses  my  idea  of 
\\democracy.  Whatever  differs  from  this,  to  the  extent 
y>f  the  difference,  is  no  democracy. — A.  LINCOLN." 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE 

A  COMPLETE  bibliography  of  books  dealing  specially 
with  Lincoln,  and  of  books  throwing  important  light 
upon  his  life  or  upon  the  history  of  the  American  Civil 
War,  cannot  be  attempted  here.  The  author  aims  only 
at  mentioning  the  books  which  have  been  of  greatest  use 
to  him  and  a  few  others  to  which  reference  ought 
obviously  to  be  made. 

The  chief  authorities  for  the  life  of  Lincoln  are  : — 

"  Abraham  Lincoln :  A  History,"  by  John  G. 
Nicolay  and  John  Hay  (his  private  secretaries),  in  ten 
volumes  :  The  Century  Company,  New  York,  and  T. 
Fisher  Unwin,  London ;  "  The  Works  of  Abraham 
Lincoln  "  (i.e.,  speeches,  letters,  and  State  papers),  in 
eight  volumes:  G.  Putnam's  Sons,  London  and  NewYork; 
and,  for  his  early  life,  "  The  Life  of  Abraham  Lincoln," 
by  Herndon  and  Weik  :  Appleton,  London  and  New 
York. 

There  are  numerous  short  biographies  of  Lincoln,  but 
among  these  it  is  not  invidious  to  mention  as  the  best 
(expressing  as  it  does  the  mature  judgment  of  the 
highest  authority)  "  A  Short  Life  of  Abraham  Lincoln," 
by  John  G.  Nicolay  :  The  Century  Company,  New  York. 

The  author  may  be  allowed  to  refer,  moreover,  to  the 
interest  aroused  in  him  as  a  boy  by  "  Abraham  Lincoln," 
by  C.  G.  Leland,  in  the  "  New  Plutarch  Series  "  :  Marcus 
Ward  &  Co.,  London  ;  and  to  the  light  he  has  much  later 
derived  from  "  Abraham  Lincoln,"  by  John  T.  Morse, 
Junior:  Houghton  Mifflin  Company,  Boston,  U.S.A. 

Among  studies  of  Lincoln,  containing  a  wealth  of 
illustrative  stories,  a  very  high  place  is  due  to  "  The 
True  Abraham  Lincoln,"  by  William  Eleroy  Curtis  :  The 
J.  B.  Lippincott  Company,  Philadelphia  and  London. 

For  the  history  of  America  at  the  period  concerned  the 


456  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

reader  may  be  most  confidently  referred  to  a  work,  which 
by  plentiful  extracts  and  citations  enables  its  writer's 
judgment  to  be  checked,  without  detracting  from  the 
interest  and  power  of  his  narrative,  namely,  "  History  of 
the  United  States,  1850 — 1877,"  by  James  Ford  Rhodes, 
in  seven  volumes  :  The  Macmillan  Company,  London 
and  New  York. 

Among  the  shorter  complete  histories  of  the  United 
States  are.:  "  The  United  States  :  an  Outline  of  Political 
History,"  by  Goldwin  Smith  :  The  Macmillan  Company, 
London  and  New  York  ;  the  article  "  United  States  of 
America  "  (section  "  History  ")  in  the  "  Encyclopaedia 
Britannica"  (see  also  the  many  excellent  articles  on 
American  biography  in  the  "  Encyclopaedia  Britan 
nica  ") ;  "  The  Cambridge  Modern  History  :  Vol.  VII., 
United  States  of  America "  :  Cambridge  University 
Press,  and  The  Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

Two  volumes  of  special  interest  in  regard  to  the  early 
days  of  the  United  States,  in  some  ways  complementary 
to  each  other  in  their  different  points  of  view,  are  : 
"Alexander  Hamilton,"  by  F.  G.  Oliver :  Constable  &  Co., 
and  "  Historical  Essays,"  by  John  Fitch. 

Almost  every  point  in  regard  to  A,merican  institutions 
and  political  practice  is  fully  treated  in  "  The  American 
Commonwealth,"  by  Viscount  Bryce,  O.M.,  two  volumes  : 
The  Macmillan  Company,  London  and  New  York. 

For  the  attitude  of  the  British  Government  during  the 
war  the  conclusive  authority  is  the  correspondence  to  be 
found  in  "The  Life  of  Lord  John  Russell,"  by  Sir 
Spencer  Walpole,  K.C.B.,  two  volumes  :  Longmans, 
Green  &  Co.,  London  and  New  York ;  and  light  on  the 
attitude' of  the  English  people  is  thrown  by  "  The  Life  of 
John  Bright,"  by  G.  M.  Trevelyan  :  Constable,  London, 
and  Houghton  Mifflin  Company,  Boston,  U.S.A. 

With  respect  to  the  military  history  of  the  Civil  War 
the  author  is  specially  indebted  to  "  The  Civil  War  in  the 
United  States,"  by  W.  Birkbeck  Wood  and  Major  J.  E. 
Edmonds,  R.E.,  with  an  introduction  by  Spenser 
Wilkinson  :  Methuen  &  Co.,  London,  and  Putnam,  New 
York,  which  is  the  only  concise  and  complete  history  of 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE  457 

the  war  written  with  full  knowledge  of  all  recent  works 
bearing  on  the  subject.  Mr.  Nicolay's  chapters  in  the 
"  Cambridge  Modern  History  "  give  a  very  lucid  narra 
tive  of  the  war. 

Among  works  of  special  interest  bearing  on  the  war, 
though  not  much  concerning  the  subject  of  this  book,  it 
is  only  necessary  to  mention  "  '  Stonewall '  Jackson,"  by 
Colonel  Henderson,  C.B.,  two  volumes :  Longmans, 
London  and  New  York  ;  "  Battles  and  Leaders  of  the 
Civil  War  "  (a  book  of  monographs  by  several  authors, 
many  of  them  actors  in  the  war),  four  volumes : 
T.  Fisher  Unwin,  London,  and  Century  Company,  New 
York,  and  "  Story  of  the  Civil  War,"  by  J.  C.  Ropes: 
Putnam,  London  and  New  York. 

It  may  be  added  that  a  life  of  General  Robert  E.  Lee 
had  been  projected,  as  a  companion  volume  to  this  in  the 
same  series,  by  Brigadier-General  Frederick  Maurice, 
C.B.,  and  it  is  to  be  hoped  that,  though  suspended  by 
the  present  war,  this  book  may  still  be  written.  Existing 
biographies  of  Lee  are  disappointing.  It  has  been 
(especially  in  view  of  this  intended  book  on  Lee)  outside 
the  scope  of  this  volume  to  present  the  history  of  the 
Civil  War  with  special  reference  to  the  Southern  actors 
in  it,  but  "  Memoirs  of  Jefferson  Davis  "  must  be  here 
referred  to  as  in  some  sense  an  authoritative,  though  not 
a  very  attractive  or  interesting,  exposition  of  the  views 
of  Southern  statesmen  at  the  time. 

An  interesting  sidelight  on  the  war  may  be  found  in 
"  Life  with  the  Confederate  Army,"  by  Watson,  being 
the  experiences  of  a  Scotchman  who  for  a  time  served 
under  the  Confederacy. 

In  regard  to  slavery  and  to  Southern  society  before 
the  war  the  author  has  made  much  use  of  "  Our  Slave 
States,"  by  Frederick  Law  Olmsted  :  Dix  and  Edwards, 
New  York,  1856,  and  other  works  of  the  same  author. 
Mr.  Olmsted  was  a  Northerner,  but  his  very  full  obser 
vations  can  be  checked  by  the  numerous  quotations 
on  the  same  subject  collected  by  Mr.  Rhodes  in  his 
history. 

For  the  history  of  the  South  since  the  war  and  the 


458  ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 

present  position  of  the  negroes,  see  the  chapters  on  this 
subject  in  Bryce's  "  American  Commonwealth,"  second 
or  any  later  edition,  two  volumes :  Macmillan,  London 
and  New  York. 

Mr.  Owen  Wister's  novel,  "  Lady  Baltimore  "  :  Mac 
millan,  London  and  New  York,  embraces  a  most  inter 
esting  study  of  the  survivals  of  the  old  Southern  society 
at  the  present  time  and  of  the  present  relations  between 
it  and  the  North. 

The  treatment  of  the  negroes  freed  during  the  war  is 
the  main  subject  of  "  Grant,  Lincoln,  and  the  Freedmen," 
by  John  Eaton  and  E.  0.  Mason  :  Longmans,  Green  & 
Co.,  London  and  New  York,  a  book  to  which  the  author 
is  also  indebted  for  other  interesting  matter. 

The  personal  memoirs,  and  especially  the  autobio 
graphies  dealing  with  the  Civil  War,  are  very  numerous, 
and  the  author  therefore  would  only  wish  to  mention 
those  which  seem  to  him  of  altogether  unusual  interest. 
"  Personal  Memoirs  of  General  U.  S.  Grant  "  :  Century 
Company,  New  York,  is  a  book  of  very  high  order 
(Sherman's  memoirs :  Appleton,  New  York,  and  his 
correspondence  with  his  brother :  Scribner,  New  York, 
have  also  been  quoted  in  these  pages). 

Great  interest  both  in  regard  to  Lincoln  personally  and 
to  the  history  of  the  United  States  after  his  death 
attaches  to  "  Reminiscences,"  by  Carl  Schurz,  three 
volumes  (Vol.  I.  being  concerned  with  Germany  in  1848) : 
John  Murray,  London,  and  Doubleday  Page,  New  York, 
and  to  "  The  Life  of  John  Hay,"  by  W.  R.  Thayer, 
two  volumes  :  Constable  &  Co.,  London,  and  Houghton 
Mifflin  Company,  Boston,  U.S.A. 

The  author  has  derived  much  light  from  "  Specimen 
Days,  and  Collect,"  by  Walt  Whitman  :  Wilson  and 
McCormick,  Glasgow,  and  McKay,  U.S.A. 

He  may  be  allowed,  in  conclusion,  to  mention  the 
encouragement  given  to  him  in  beginning  his  work  by 
the  late  Mr.  Henry  James,  O.M.,  whose  vivid  and 
enthusiastic  judgment  of  Lincoln,  he  had  the  privilege 
of  receiving. 


CHRONOLOGICAL   TABLE 


Some   events  in  History  of  United 
States. 

1759.     Capture  of  Quebec. 


1765.     Stamp  Act  passed. 

1 776.    Declaration  of  Independence. 


1783.     American  Independence  re 
cognised. 
1787.     Constitution   framed. 

North  West  Territory  ceded 
by  States  to  Congress  and 
slavery  excluded  from  it. 
Constitution  comes  into  force. 


1789. 


Eli  Whitney  invents  cotton 
gin. 


Some  events  in  English  and  General 
History. 

1759.  Capture  of  Quebec. 

1757 — 60.     Ministry     of     Chatham 
(William  Pitt). 

1760.  Contrat  Social  published. 
1764 — 76.     Great      inventions      in 

spinning  industries. 
1765.  Watt's  steam  engine. 
1776.  Publication  of  "  Wealth  of 

Nations." 

1778.     Death  of  Chatham. 
1782.     Rodney's  victory. 


1799.     Death  of  Washington. 

1803.  Louisiana  purchase. 

1804.  Death  of  Hamilton. 


1807.  Fulton's       steam-boat      on 

Hudson. 

1808.  Slave    Trade    abolished    by 

U.S.A. 


1809.     Abraham  Lincoln  born.  1809. 


1812—1814.     War     with     Great 
Britain. 

1820.     Missouri    Compromise. 
1823.     Monroe  doctrine  declared. 


1789.     Meeting  of  States  General. 

1793.  England  at  war  with  French 

Republic. 

1794.  Slave    Trade    abolished    by 

French  Convention. 

1802.  Peace  of  Amiens. 

1803.  England  at  war  with  Napo 

leon. 

1805.  Trafalgar. 

1806.  The      American       Fulton's 

steam-boat  on  Seine. 

1807.  Slave    Trade    abolished    by 

Great  Britain. 

1808.  Battle     of     Vimiera.     Con 

vention  of  Cintra. 

Wordsworth's  literary  activ 
ity  about  at  its  culmina 
tion. 

Darwin,  Tennyson  and  Glad 
stone  born. 


1815.     Waterloo. 


1825.     First     railway     opened     in 
England. 


460 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 


Some  events   in   History  of  United 
States. 

1826.     Death  of  Jefferson. 


1828.     Commencement  of  "  nullifi 
cation  "  movement. 
Election  of  Jackson. 

1830.  Hayne-Webster  debate. 

1831.  Garrison  publishes  first  num 

ber  of  Liberator. 
Lincoln  starts   life  in  New 

Salem. 
First     railway     opened     in 

America. 


1834.     Lincoln  elected    to    Illinois 
legislature. 

1837.     End    of    Jackson's    second 
presidency. 


1841.  First  telegraph  in  America. 

1842.  Lincoln  leaves  Illinois  legis 

lature,      and      (Nov.)     is 
married. 


1845.  Annexation  of  Texas. 

1846.  Boundary    of    Oregon    and 

British    Columbia    settled 
with  Great  Britain. 

1846-7.     Mexican  war. 

1847-8.     Lincoln  in  Congress. 

1848.     Gold  discovery  in  California 

1850.     Clay's  compromise  adopted. 

Death   of   Calham. 
1852.     Deaths  of  Clay  and  Webster. 

1854.     Missouri     Compromise     re 
pealed. 
Republican  Party  formed. 


Some  events  in  English  and  General 
History. 

1826.  Independence  of  Mexico  and 

Spanish  Colonies  in  South 
America  recognised  by 
Canning. 

1827.  Navarino. 


1829.     Catholic  emancipation. 
1831.     Mazzini  founds  Young  Italy. 


1832.  First  Reform  Bill. 

1833.  Slavery  abolished  in  British 

Colonies. 


1836—40.     Great  Boer  Trek. 

1837.  Queen   Victoria's   accession. 
First  steam-boat  from  Eng 
land  to  America. 

1838.  First  telegraph  line  in  Eng 

land. 

1839.  Lord    Durham's    report    on 

Canada. 


1844. 


1846. 


Martin  Chuzzlewit 
lished. 


pub- 


Boundary    of    Oregon    and 
British    Columbia   settled 
with  U.S.A. 
1846-7.     Irish  famine. 

1848.  Revolution  in  France  and  in 
many  parts  of  Europe. 

1850.  Constitution  Act  for  Austra 
lian  colonies. 

1852.  Constitution  Act  for  New 
Zealand. 

1854-5.     Gold  rush  to  Australia. 

1854-6.  Abolition  of  slavery  in 
various  Portuguese  Domi 
nions. 

1854-5.     Crimean  War. 


CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE 


461 


Some    events  in  History  of   United 
States. 

1856.  Defeat      of      Fremont      by 

Buchanan. 

1857.  Dred  Scott  case. 

1858.  Kansas.        Lincoln-Douglas 

debate. 

1859.  John  Brown's  raid. 


1860.  Nov.     Lincoln  elected  Pre 

sident. 

Dec.  Secession  carried  in 
South  Carolina. 

1 86 1.  Feb.  4.     Southern  Confede 

racy  formed. 

Mar.  4.  Lincoln  inaugu 
rated. 

Ap.  12 — 14.  Bombardment 
of  Fort  Sumter. 

Ap.  War  begins.  Further 
secessions. 

July.  First  Battle  of  Bull 
Run. 

Dec.  Claim  of  Great  Bri 
tain  as  to  Trent  accepted. 

1862.  Ap. — Aug.       McClellan     in 

Peninsula. 

Ap.     Shiloh. 

May.  Jackson  in  Shenan- 
doah  Valley. 

Aug. — Oct.  Confederates  in 
Kentucky. 

Aug.  Second  Battle  of  Bull 
Run. 

Sept.  Antietam.  Procla 
mation  of  emancipation. 

Nov.     McClellan  removed. 

Dec.  Fredericksburg.  Mur- 
freesborough. 

1863.  Mar.  i.     Conscription  Act. 
May.     Chancellorsville. 

Jackson  killed. 
July.     Gettysburg,    Vicks- 

burg.     New  York  riots. 
Sept.     Chickamauga. 
Nov.     Gettysburg      speech. 

Chattanooga. 

1864.  May.     Beginning  of  Grant's 

and  Sherman's  great  cam 
paigns. 

June.  Cold  Harbour.  Balti 
more  Convention. 

July.  Early's  raid  reaches 
Washington, 


Some  events  in  English  and  General 
History. 


[857-8.     Indian  Mutiny. 


1859.  Publication    of    "  Origin   of 

Species." 
1 8  59-60.     Kingdom  of  Italy  formed. 

1860.  Slavery  abolished  in  Dutch 

East  Indies. 


1 86 1.     Emancipation     of     Russian 
serfs. 


1862.     Alabama   escapes   from   the 
Mersey  (July). 


1863.     Revolution  in  Poland. 

Maximilian  proclaimed  Em 
peror  of  Mexico. 


1864.     Prussia  and  Austria  invade 
Denmark. 


462 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 


Some  events  in  History  of  United 
States. 

1864.  Aug.     Mobile.  Chicago  Con 

vention. 
Sept.     Sherman  at  Atlanta. 

Sheridan    in    Shenandoah 

Valley. 
Nov.       Lincoln      re-elected 

President. 
Dec.     Nashville.      Sherman 

at  Savannah. 

1865.  Jan.     Congress  passes   I3th 

Amendment. 

Feb.  Further  progress  of 
Sherman  and  Sheridan. 

Mar.  4.  Second  inaugura 
tion  of  Lincoln. 

Ap.  2 — 9.  Richmond  falls, 
and  Lee  surrenders. 

Ap.  14 — 15.  Lincoln  assas 
sinated  and  dies. 

Dec.  13.  Amendment  rati 
fied. 

1866.  Atlantic    cable    successfully 

laid. 


Some  events  in  English  and  General 
History. 


1868.  Rise  of  acute  disorder  in 
"  reconstructed  "  South. 

1870.  Amendment  securing  Negro 
suffrage. 

1872.  Alabama  arbitration  with 
Great  Britain. 


1876.  Admitted  failure  of  Recon 

struction.      Election      of 
Hayes. 

1877.  Federal    troops    withdrawn 

from  South, 


1866.  Atlantic    cable    successfully 

laid. 

War   between   Austria    and 
Prussia. 

1867.  British  North  America  Act. 
Slave  children  emancipated 

in  Brazil. 

Fall  and  execution  of  Maxi 
milian  in  Mexico. 

1868.  Mikado      resumes      govern 

ment  in  Japan. 

1870.     Papal  infallibility.     Franco- 
German  war. 

1872.     Alabama    arbitration    with 

U.S.A. 

Responsible  Government  in 
Cape  Colony. 


1878.     Slavery   abolished   in   Cuba 
(last  of  Spanish  Colonies). 


INDEX 


ABOLITION  and  Abolitionists  :  Early  movement  dies  down,  36-9  ;  rise  of 
later  movement,  50-2  ;  persecuted,  51,  76  ;  Lincoln's  attitude,  76, 
100,  116,  125-6,  151  5  their  position  in  view  of  civil  war,  171.  See 
Slavery  and  Garrison. 

Adams,  Charles  Francis  :   236,  261,  263,  326. 

Adams,  John  :   37,  236. 

Adams,  John  Quincy  :   47,  51,  113,  312,  385. 

Aesop  :    10. 

Alabama,  the  :  223,  250,  263. 

Alabama  State  :    174,  198,  211,  358,  385. 

Alamo  :    90. 

Alexander  II.  of  Russia  :   255. 

Alleghany  (01  Appalachian)  Mountains  :  26,  224,  243  ;  distinct  character 
of  people  in  them,  56,  197. 

Alley  :   426-7. 

Alton  :   76. 

Amendment  of  Constitution  :  how  carried,  24  ;  suggested  amendment  to 
conciliate  South,  191  ;  Thirteenth  Amendment  prohibiting  slavery, 
333-4,  428,  430  ;  Fifteenth  Amendment  requiring  negro  suffrage, 
_  332-3^ 

America,  United  States  of,  and  American  :  Diverse  character  of  Colonies, 
resemblances  to  and  differences  from  England,  16-20  ;  first  attempt 
at  Union,  20  ;  independence  and  making  of  Constitution,  21-3  ; 
features  of  Constitution,  23-5  ;  expansion,  26-8  ;  Union  Government 
brought  into  effect,  28-30,  41  ;  rise  of  national  tradition,  30-5  ;  com 
promise  on  main  cause  of  disunion,  slavery,  35-40  ;  parties  and 
tendencies  in  first  half  of  nineteenth  century,  40-52  ;  triumph  of 
Union  sentiment,  45-6  ;  growth  of  separate  interest  and  sentiment  in 
South,  43-5,  52-9  ;  intellectual  development  and  foundations  of 
American  patriotism,  59-61  ;  further  compromise  on  slavery,  95-100  ; 
political  cleavage  of  North  and  South  becomes  definite,  108-11  ;  "  a 
house  divided  against  itself,"  142-6  ;  for  further  developments,  see 
North  and  South;  see  also  Lincoln ;  Lincoln's  position  as  to  enforcement 
of  union,  142-3  ;  common  heritage  of  America  from  Civil  War,  452. 

American  Party,  or  Know-Nothings  :    in,  116-7.. 

American  Policy  (so-called)  :   42-8. 

Anderson,  Major  :    188-9,  2O7?  211-2,  446. 

Appalachians.     See  Alleghany  Mountains. 

Appomattox  River  and  Court  House  :   443-5. 

Arbitration  :   262-4. 

Argyll,  Duke  of :    176,  259. 

Arizona  :   95. 


464  INDEX 

Arkansas  River  :   28,  349. 

Arkansas  State  :    198,  228,  244,  349. 

Armstrong,  Jack  and  Hannah  :   64,  106. 

Army  :  comparison  of  Northern  and  Southern  men,  215  ;  and  their  officers, 
215-6,  219,  222-3,  348;  system  of  recruiting,  220-2,  361-725  dis 
cipline,  219,  247,  281,  417-8  ;  size  of  regular  army,  227.  See  also 
Conscription,  Voluntary  Service  and  Militia. 

Articles  of  Confederation  and  Perpetual  Union  :    20,  174. 

Atlanta  :   225-6,  391-2,  393,  421. 

Augusta  :   432. 


BAKER  :   89. 

Baltimore  :   204,  238-41,  450  ;   Conventions  there,  158,  407-8. 

Banks,  N.  P.,  General :   295,  352-3,  386. 

Bates,  Attorney-General :    165,  200-1,  263,  318,  402. 

Battles  (sieges,  campaigns,  etc.,  separately  entered)  :  Antietam,  304-5,  311, 
322-3,  446  ;  Bentonville,  434  ;  Bull  Run,  first  battle,  244-8  ;  Bull 
Run,  second  battle,  303,  311  ;  Cedar  Creek,  393  ;  Champion's  Hill, 
352;  Chancellorsville,  310-11;  Chattanooga,  358;  Chickamauga, 
357  ;  Cold  Harbour,  390,  408  ;  Five  Forks,  442  ;  Fort  Donelson, 
280;  Four  Oaks,  294;  Franklin,  393-4;  Fredericksburg,  308,  311  ; 
Gettysburg,  355,  446 ;  Kenesaw  Mountain,  391  ;  Manassas  (two 
battles),  see  Bull  Run ;  Mill  Springs,  279  ;  Mobile,  392  ;  Murfrees- 
borough,  341,  446;  Nashville,  394;  New  Orleans,  282;  Perry ville, 
340  ;  Sailor's  Creek,  444  ;  Seven  Days'  Battles,  297  ;  Seven  Pines,  see 
Four  Oaks  ;  Shiloh,  281-2  ;  Spotsylvania,  389  ;  Wilderness,  389. 

Bazaine,  Marshal  :    385. 

Bell,  John  :    158. 

Bentham,  Jeremy  :    32. 

Berry  :   66-7. 

Bible  :    10,  131,  436-7. 

Bismarck  :   421. 

Black:    184. 

Black  Hawk:   65. 

Blackstone's  Commentaries  :    67. 

Blair,  Francis,  senr.  :   429-30. 

Blair,  Montgomery  :    201,  207,  244,  402,  407. 

Blockade  :   223,  225,  250-1,  433. 

Booth,  John  Wilkes  :   448. 

Border  States  :    170,  227-8,  242-4,  269,  316-7,  331-3. 

Boston  :  47,  51,  59'6o>  I71'2' 

Boswell,  James  :    101. 

Bragg,  General :   338'4IJ  349>  357  8.  384'5- 

Breckinridge,  John  C.  :    158. 

Bright,  John:    136,  235,  258. 

British  Columbia  :   28,  109. 

Brooks,  Phillips  :   60. 

Brooks,  Preston  :    137-8. 

Brown,  John  :    125,  149-54?  *96>  394 


INDEX  465 

Brown,  Judge  :  85. 

Buchanan,  James  :    in,  136,  139,  140,  176,  183-9,  2O5>  2O7j  23°- 

Buell,  Don  Carlos,  General :   273,  275-81,  337-42,  367. 

Bummers  :    395. 

Burlingame  :    138. 

Burns,  Robert :    102,  104. 

Burnside,  Ambrose,  General :    306,  308,  357-8,  380,  390,  432. 

Burr,  Aaron  :   29. 

Butler,  Benjamin,  General :   267,  282,  389-90,  406-7,  433,  441. 

Butterfield  :  94. 


CALHOUN,  John  :   68. 

Calhoun,  John  Caldwell :   his  character  and  influence,  42-5  ;   his  doctrine  of 
"  nullification "    and    secession,    45-6  ;     his    death,    99 ;     further 
references,  96,  in,  113,  174,  181. 
California  :   28,  90-2,  95-8. 
Cambridge,  Massachusetts  :   59. 
Cameron,  Simon  :    165-6,  200-2,  241,  270. 
Campbell,  Justice  :   209,  443. 
Canada  :    175,  210,  380. 

Carolina.     See  North  Carolina  and  South  Carolina. 
Cass,  General :   65,  93,  95,  171,  185. 
Castlereagh  :   375. 
Cecil,  Lord  R.     See  Salisbury. 
Central  America  :    144. 
Channing,  Rev.  William  Eleroy  :   51. 
Charles  I.  :   430. 

Charleston  :  43,  250-2,  384,  432.     And  see  Fort  Sumter. 
Chase,  Salmon  P.  :   rising  opponent  of  slavery,  100  ;   approves  of  Lincoln's 
opposition  to  Douglas,   140  ;    claims  to  the  Presidency,   160,   165  ; 
Secretary    of   the   Treasury,    200-1  ;    his   successful    administration 
of    finance,   253  ;      regarded    as    Radical   leader,   intrigues   against 
Lincoln  and  causes  difficulty  in  Cabinet,  326-7  ;     continues  trouble 
some,  desires  Presidency,  resigns,  404-5  ;    appointed  Chief  Justice, 
426-7  ;  other  references,  207,  309,  412. 
Chatham,  20,  233. 

Chattanooga  :   225-6,  337-8,  340-1,  357-8,  385,  391. 
Chicago  :   Republican  Convention  there,  165-8  ;   deputation  of  clergy,  321  ; 

Democratic  Convention,  408-11. 
Choate,  Joseph  H.  :    105,  155. 
Civil  Service  :   50. 
Civil  War.     See  War. 
Clary's  Grove  :   64,  66. 
Clay,  Henry :   41  ;   his  character  and  career,  42,  48  ;   compromise  of  1850 

originated  by  him,  98  ;   his  death,  99  ;   Lincoln  on  him,  100,  121. 
Cobb  :    184. 

Cobden,  Richard  :  256,  257. 
Cock-fighting  :   63,  69. 


466 


INDEX 


Collamer,  Senator :    166. 

Colonies.     See  America. 

Colonisation.     See  Negroes. 

Columbia,  South  Carolina  :  432. 

Columbia,  District  of  :   93,  317. 

Columbia  River  :   28. 

Columbus,  Georgia  :   225-6. 

Compulsory  Service.     See  Conscription. 

Confederacy,  Confederates  :  see  also  South  ;  Confederacy  of  six  States 
formed  and  Constitution  adopted  at  Montgomery  and  claims  of  these 
States  to  Federal  Government's  forts,  etc.,  or  their  soil  taken  over, 
198-200  ;  commencement  of  war  by  Confederacy,  211-2  5  area  of  its 
country  and  difficulty  of  conquest,  213-5  ;  character  of  population, 
215  ;  spirit  of  independence  animating  Confederacy,  217-8  ;  other 
conditions  telling  against  or  for  its  success  in  the  war,  213-226  ; 
original  Confederate  States,  viz.,  South  Carolina,  Georgia,  Alabama, 
Mississippi,  Louisiana,  Florida,  joined  subsequently  by  Texas,  and 
on  outbreak  of  war  by  Virginia,  North  Carolina,  Tennessee,  and 
Arkansas,  227-8  ;  capital  moved  to  Richmond,  241  ;  for  course  of 
war,  see  War  ;  for  political  course  of  Confederacy,  see  J.  Davis  and 
Congress  of  Confederacy ;  attitude  of  foreign  Governments  to 
Confederacy,  255,  260,  301,  311  ;  refusal  of  Lincoln  to  treat  with 
Confederacy  as  an  independent  state,  399-400,  428-30  ;  refusal  of 
Davis  to  negotiate  on  other  terms,  425,  428-30  ;  ultimate  surrender 
of  Confederate  forces  and  dispersion  of  its  Government,  442-5. 

Congregationalists  :    17,  19. 

Congress  of  original  American  Confederation  :  20,  38. 

Congress  of  U.S.A.  under  the  Constitution  :  distinguished  from  Parliament 
by  the  severance  between  it  and  the  executive  government,  by  the 
limitation  of  its  functions  to  strictly  Federal  matters,  and  by  its 
subjection  to  provisions  of  Constitution,  23-4,  see  also  369,  375-7,  399, 
426  ;  for  certain  Acts  of  Congress,  see  Slavery  ;  attempts  at  pacifica 
tion  during  progress  of  Secession,  191-2  ;  action  of  and  discussions  in 
Congress  during  Civil  War,  245,  252,  262,  264-5,  268,  270,  275,  287, 
314-7,  319-20,  324-6,  331-4,  349,  367-8,  376,  378,  379,  385,  386,  397-9, 

43i- 

Congress  of  Confederacy  :    199,  364-5,  428. 

Conscription  :  in  South,  364-5  ;  in  North,  362-3,  367-72  ;  superior  on 
grounds  of  moral  principle  to  voluntary  system,  364. 

Conservative,  the  :    118. 

Conservatives  :   244,  266-7,  326. 

Constitution,  British  :   20,  23,  375. 

Constitution  of  United  States  :  22-5,  41.  See  also  Amendment  of  Consti 
tution. 

Contraband  :   267,  406. 

Cooper  Institute  :    143,  154. 

Copperheads  :   379. 

Corinth  :   282,  336-7. 

Cotton:    39,  258-9,  313. 

Cow  Island  :   329. 

Cowper,  William  :    n. 

Crjttenden  ;   191-4. 


INDEX  467 

Cuba:   144,  158. 

Cumberland  River  :   225,  276,  279-80. 

Curtis,  B.  R.,  Justice  :    112. 

DARWIN,  Charles  :    136,  258. 

Davis,  David,  Justice  :    166,  376. 

Davis,  Henry  Winter  :   385,  398. 

Davis,  Jefferson:  his  rise  as  an  extreme  Southern  leader,  100,  136,  149; 
inclined  to  favour  slave  trade,  144;  his  argument  forrightof  Secession, 
175  ;  his  part  in  Secession,  197-8  ;  President  of  Confederacy,  199  ; 
vetoes  Bill  against  slave  trade  as  inadequate  and  fraudulent,  199  ; 
orders  attack  on  Fort  Sumter,  211  ;  criticisms  upon  his  military 
policy,  216-7,  384-5  ;  ^his  part  in  the  war,  245,  353, 384-5,  392, 428, 433, 
443  ;  his  determination  to  hold  out  and  his  attitude  to  peace,  400-1, 
428-31  ;  as  to  prisoners  of  war,  328,  396  ;  escape  from  Richmond 
and  last  public  action,  443  ;  his  capture,  and  his  emotions  on 
Lincoln's  assassination,  449-50  ;  his  memoirs,  450,  457. 

Dayton,  Senator  :   165. 

Declaration  of  Independence  :  meaning  of  its  principles,  32-5  ;  how  slave 
holders  signed  it,  35-9  ;  Lincoln's  interpretation  of  it,  122  ;  his  great 
speech  upon  it,  183. 

Delaware  :    17,  197,  316,  332. 

Democracy  :  fundamental  ideas  in  it,  32-9,  122  ;  development  of  extreme 
form  and  of  certain  abuses  of  it  in  America,  47-50  ;  its  institutions 
and  practices  still  in  an  early  stage  of  development,  50  ;  a  foolish 
perversion  of  it  in  the  Northern  States,  59,  217  ;  Lincoln  sees  a 
decay  of  worthy  and  honest  democratic  feeling,  116  ;  the  Civil  War 
regarded  by  Lincoln  and  many  in  North  as  a  test  whether  democratic 
government  could  maintain  itself,  182-3,  3°"oi,  422  5  tne  sense  in 
which  Lincoln  was  a  great  democrat,  452-3. 

Democratic  Party  :  traces  descent  from  Jefferson,  30  ;  originated  or  started 
anew  by  Jackson,  its  principles,  47-8  ;  general  subservience  of  its 
leaders  to  Southern  interests,  91,  109,  139,  see  also  Mexico,  Pierce, 
Douglas,  Buchanan ;  breach  between  Northern  and  Southern 
Democrats,  140,  147-9,  JS^-S  ;  Northern  Democrats  loyal  to  Union, 
171-3,  176,  187,  230  ;  progress  of  Democratic  opposition  to  Lincoln, 
266,314,  372-3,  379-83,398,408-12;  Lincoln's  appeal  after  defeating 
them,  422. 

Dickens,  Charles  :   31,  32,  41,  258. 

Disraeli,  Benjamin  :  74,  259. 

Dough-Faces  :  40. 

Douglas,  Stephen  :  rival  to  Lincoln  in  Illinois  Legislature,  71  5  possibly 
also  in  love,  81,  87  ;  his  rise,  influence,  and  character,  100,  108-9  ; 
repeals  Missouri  Compromise,  109-10  ;  supports  rights  of  Kansas,  1 14, 
140;  Lincoln's  contest  with  him,  119-20,  130-5,  140-9;  gist  of 
Lincoln's  objection  to  his  principles,  129,  141-4 ;  unsuccessful 
candidate  for  Presidency,  158,  167-8;  attitude  to  Secession,  187; 
relations  with  Lincoln  after  Secession,  205,  209,  230  ;  death,  230. 

Douglass,  Frederick :  330. 

Drink:  63,  76-7,  351,  420. 

Dundreary  :  447. 


468  INDEX 

EARLY,  General :   391,  392,  435. 

Eaton,  John  :   328-30,  345,  413,  458. 

Edmonds.     See  Wood  and  Edmonds. 

Edwards,  Mrs.  Ninian  :  81. 

Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo  :   60,  151,  423. 

Episcopalians  :   85,  348,  436. 

Equality.     See  Declaration  of  Independence. 

Euclid   :    103,  131. 

Everett,  Edward  :    158,  360. 

FARRAGUT,  David,  Admiral :  230,  282,  347,  385,  392,  409,  421,  432. 

Federalism  :   22. 

Federalist  Party  :   30,  172. 

Filibustering  :   (i)  in  sense  of  piracy  :    193. 

(2)  in  sense  of  obstruction  :    331. 

Fillmore,  Millard  :   97,  in,  112,  131. 

Finance  :   67-8,  253. 

Florida  :    16,  26,  198,  250,  449. 

Fort  Donelson  :   279-80. 

Fort  Fisher  :   433. 

Fort  Henry  :   279. 

Fort  Monroe  :   267,  291. 

Fort  Sumter  :    186-9,  200,  207,  209,  211-2,  227,  446. 

Fox,  Gustavus  V.  :   201,  251-2,  263. 

France  :  influence  of  French  Revolution,  31  ;  Louisiana  territory  acquired 
from  France,  26  ;  French  settlers,  27  ;  slavery  in  Louisiana  State, 
39-40  ;  relations  with  America  during  Civil  War,  210,  255,  261,  311, 
385,  401,  417. 

Frankfort,  Kentucky  :   338. 

Franklin,  Benjamin  :   37. 

Franklin,  Tennessee  :    393-4. 

Free-Soil  Party  :    1 10. 

Free  Trade  :  45,  257. 

Fremont,  John  :    in,  132,  268-9,  273>  276>  295'6)  SHj  4°6-7- 

Fry,  J.  B.,  General :   367. 

GARRISON,  William  Lloyd  :   50-2,  334. 

Gentryville  :   4,  6,  7. 

Gettysburg,  Lincoln's  speech  at :    360-1. 

Georgia  :    36,  56,  198,  225,  393-5. 

George  II.  :   351. 

Gibbon,  Edward  :   66. 

Gilmer  :    193. 

Gladstone,  W.  E.  :   257. 

Goldsborough  :   434,  441. 

Governors  of  States  :   20,  160,  221,  298,  342-3,  360. 

Graham,  Mentor  :   63,  64,  68. 


INDEX  469 

Grant,  Ulysses  S.,  General :  previous  disappointing  career  and  return  to 
Army,  earlier  success  in  Civil  War,  279  ;  captures  Fort  Henry  and 
Fort  Donelson,  surprised  but  successful  at  Shiloh,  279-83  ;  negro 
refugees  with  his  army,  328  ;  kept  idle  as  Halleck's  second  in  com 
mand,  and  on  his  departure  left  on  defensive  near  Corinth,  337,  340  ; 
his  reputation  now  and  his  real  greatness  of  character,  343-6 ; 
Vicksburg  campaigns,  346-53  ;  Lincoln's  relations  with  him  from 
the  first,  350-1  ;  Chattanooga  campaign,  357-8  ;  appointed  Lieutenant 
General,  meeting  with  Lincoln,  parting  from  Sherman,  386-8  ;  plans 
for  final  stages  of  war,  387  ;  unsuccessful  attempts  to  crush  Lee  in 
the  open  field  and  movement  to  City  Point  for  siege  of  Petersburg 
and  Richmond  in  which  first  operations  fail,  388-90  ;  sends  Sheridan 
to  Shenandoah  Valley,  391-2  ;  unnecessary  anxiety  as  to  Thomas, 
394  ;  siege  of  Petersburg  and  Richmond  continued,  395  ;  attempts 
to  get  him  to  run  for  Presidency,  407-8  ;  his  loyalty  to  Lincoln,  413-4  ; 
his  wish  to  promote  peace,  430  ;  further  progress  of  siege,  433,  434-5  ; 
Lincoln's  visit  to  him  at  City  Point,  440-2  ;  forbidden  to  treat  with 
Lee  on  political  questions,  442  ;  fall  of  Richmond,  442-3  5  Lee  forced 
to  surrender,  443-5  ;  last  interview  with  Lincoln,  446-7 ;  Memoirs, 
^456. 

Granville,  Earl :   259. 

Gray,  Asa  :    136. 

Great  Britain  and  Ireland  :  early  relations  with  U.S.A.,  16-20  ;  relative 
progress  of  the  two  countries  at  different  periods,  32,  33,  38  ;  English 
views  of  American  Revolution,  21,  see  Constitution  of  Great  Britain 
and  U.S.A.  ;  war  in  1812-14  with  U.S.A.,  42,  46,  272  ;  comparisons 
of  English  and  American  Government,  49,  50  ;  relations  of  the  two 
countries  in  the  Civil  War,  210,  255-64,  311  ;  voluntary  system  of 
recruiting  in  the  two  countries  and  its  result  in  each,  362-4,  370  ; 
Lincoln's  fame  in  England,  451. 

Greeley,  Horace  :    136,  142,  244,  320-1,  401-2. 

Greene,  Bowline  :   79. 

Greensborough  :   434,  449. 

Grigsby,  Reuben  and  family  :   6,  II,  12. 

Grimes,  Senator  :    193. 

HALLECK,  Henry  W.,  General  :   273,  276-83,  296-7,  300-1,  305,  308,  336-41, 

t  347,  354,  392- 
Hamilton,  Alexander  :    his  greatness,  28  ;    his  origin  and  career,  he  brings 

the  Union  Government  into  successful  operation,  his  beautiful  and 

heroic  character,  29-30  ;    original  source  of  Monroe  doctrine,  385  ; 

other   references,    34,    37 ;    his   view  on  construction  of  Statutes, 

375-6. 

Hampton  Roads  :   430-1. 
Hanks,  Dennis  :   4,  6,  417. 
Hanks,  John  :   4,  6,  14,  165. 
Hanks,  Joseph  :  4. 
Harcourt,  Lady  :   414. 
Hardin  :   89. 

Harper's  Ferry  :    150,  238. 
Harrison,  William  Henry  :   72. 
Harrison's  Landing  :   297-301. 


470  INDEX 

Harvard  :   59,  328,  440. 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel  :   99. 

Hay,  John  :   234,  360,  416,  455,  458. 

Hayne,  Senator  :   45. 

Henderson,  Colonel  :   220. 

Herndon,  William  :  66,  79,  86,  93,  101-2,  104,  118,  125,  141,  146,  164. 

Hood,  John  B.,  General :   392,  393-4. 

Hooker,  Joseph,  General :   308-10,  353-4,  358,  359. 

House  of  Commons.     See  Parliament. 

House  of  Lords  :   33. 

House  of  Representatives.    See  Congress  of  U.S.A. 

Houston,  Governor  :    198. 

Hugo,  Victor  :    151. 

Hunter,  General :   319,  392-3. 

Hymns  :    n,  437. 

ILLINOIS  :  27,  38,  Chapters  I.,  III.,  IV.,  i  and  3,  and  V.,  i,  3,  and  5  ;  342,  348. 
Inaugural  Address  :    Lincoln's  first,  205-6  ;    his  second,  438-40  ;   Jefferson 

Davis',  199-200. 

Inaugural  Ceremony  :   Lincoln's  first,  205  ;   Lincoln's  second,  435. 
Independence.     See  Declaration  of  Independence. 
Independents.     See  Congregationalists. 
Indiana  :   4,  9,  27,  38,  342. 
Indians,  North  American  :   3,  65. 
Iowa  :   27,  193. 
Ironclads  :   251. 

JACKSON,  Andrew  :  his  opinion  of  Calhoun,  43  ;  frustrates  movement  for 
nullification,  46  ;  his  character,  46  ;  revives  party  and  promotes 
growth  of  party  machinery,  and  adopts  "  spoils  system,"  47-50  ; 
other  references,  66,  172,  208,  406. 

Jackson,  Thomas  J.,  called  "  Stonewall,"  General :  his  acknowledged 
genius,  216,  219  ;  goes  with  State  of  Virginia,  228  ;  his  character, 
229  ;  Shenandoah  Valley  campaign  and  movement  to  outflank 
McClellan,  294-7  5  Antietam  campaign,  304  ;  killed  during  victory  of 
Chancellorsville,  310  ;  Lee's  estimate  of  his  loss,  355. 

James,  Henry :   458. 

James  River  :   291,  297,  389-90,  435,  443. 

Jefferson,  Thomas  :  curious  and  displeasing  character,  30  ;  great  and  lasting 
influence  on  American  life,  30-2  ;  practical  achievements  in  states 
manship,  32  ;  real  sense  and  value  of  his  doctrine,  32-5  ;  opinion  and 
action  as  to  slavery,  37-8  ;  other  references,  28,  46,  56,  178. 

Jiggers  :    329. 

Johnson,  Andrew  :   397,  408,  448,  450. 

Johnson,  Samuel :   33,  35. 

Johnston,  Albert  Sidney,  General  :   275-6,  280-1. 

Johnston,  John  :   4,  6,  14. 

Johnston,  Joseph,  General :  217,  246-7,  286-7,  294,  352-3,  376,  384,  387, 
391'2?  433-4,  449- 


INDEX  471 

KANSAS:   108-10,  114,  116,  125,  127,  138-9,  161-2. 

Kentucky :  2-5,  9,  26,  81,  191,  196,  224,  228,  269,  332,  337'34i- 

Kipling,  Rudyard  :   88. 

Kirkham's  Grammar  :   63. 

"  Know-Nothings."     See  American  Party. 

Knoxville  :  225,  274,  357. 

LAW,  Lincoln's  law  study  and  practice,  10,  67,  68,  105-7,  270-1,  420. 

Lee,  Robert  E.,  General :  his  acknowledged  genius,  216,  219  ;  goes  with 
State  of  Virginia,  228,  238,  376  ;  his  character,  229  ;  cautious  military 
advice  at  first,  245  ;  opinion  of  McClellan,  284  ;  operations  against 
McClellan,  Pope,  Burnside,  and  Hooker,  296-310  ;  invasion  of  Penn 
sylvania  and  retreat,  353-6,  384-5  ;  resistance  to  Grant,  see  Grant, 
388-90,  395  ;  appointed  General  in  Chief,  428  ;  abstains  always  from 
political  action,  428-9  ;  final  effort,  surrender,  and  later  life,  442-4. 

Lincoln,  Abraham,  President :  his  career  and  policy  up  to  his  Presidency, 
see  in  Table  of  Contents  ;  his  military  administration  and  policy, 
272-8,  301,  307,  343,  and  see  McClellan  ;  his  administration  generally, 
249-54  ;  his  foreign  policy  260-4  ;  his  policy  generally,  264-71,  and 
see  Slavery,  Negotiations  for  Peace,  Reconstruction  ;  development  of 
his  abilities  and  character,  7-15,  62,  73-7,  87-8,  102-5,  133-5,  J52-4> 
162-5,  232-8,  335,  415-21,  436-8  ;  his  fame  to-day/ 45 1-3. 

Lodge,  Senator  :   260. 

Logan,  General :   348,  394. 

Longfellow,  Henry  Wadsworth  :   53,  60,  61,  136,  151. 

Longstreet,  General :   355,  357-8,  384-5. 

Louisiana  Purchase  :   26,  32,  39-40. 

Louisiana  State  :   26,  39-40,  198,  282,  332,  397,  445-6. 

Louisville:    115,338-9. 

Lovejoy  :   76. 

Lowell,  James  Russell,  and  references  to  his  writings  :  19,  91,  136,  171,  208, 
236,  260,  263. 

Lundy  :   50. 

Lynchburg :  435. 

Lyon,  Nathaniel :   243-4,  268. 

Lyons,  Lord  :   235,  236,  263. 

MCDOWELL,  General :   246-7,  289,  292-6. 

Machine,  in  politics  :   48-9,  166-7. 

McClean,  Justice  :    112,  1 66. 

McClellan,  George  B.,  General :  practical  help  to  Douglas,  133  ;  successes 
in  West  Virginia,  242  ;  put  in  command  of  Army  of  Potomac  and 
later  of  all  armies,  272  ;  his  strategic  views  at  outset  of  war,  273-4, 
275,  279  ;  his  career  and  character,  283-5  ;  Lincoln's  problem  about 
him  285-6  ;  procrastination  and  friction  before  he  moved,  286-90  ; 
preliminaries  to  campaign  in  Peninsula,  290-2  ;  relieved  of  command 
over  Western  armies,  2^2  ;  campaign  in  Peninsula,  292-4,  297-301  ; 
his  recall  and  failure  to  support  Pope,  301-3  ;  army  of  Potomac 
restored  to  him,  304  ;  battle  of  Antietam  and  subsequent  delays, 
304-6  ;  his  final  dismissal  and  its  cause,  306-8  ;  his  political  career, 
299)  3°7>  372,  4.10-12,  413,  421  ;  resigns  from  Army,  434;  Seward's 
judgment  on  him,  423. 


472 


INDEX 


McClernand,  General :   348-50. 

Madison,  James  :   37. 

Maine  :    16,  40. 

Malplaquet  :   361. 

Marcy  :  49. 

Marshall,  John  :   41. 

Martial  Law  :   374-9.     See  also  264-6,  268-9,  312,  319,  333-4,  448. 

Martineau,  Harriet  :   43. 

Maryland  :    196,  224,  239-41,  303-6,  331-2. 

Mason  :   262. 

Massachusetts  :    16,  20,  171-2,  238-9,  295,  406. 

Mathematics  :   67.     And  see  Euclid. 

Maximilian,  Archduke  and  Emperor  :   385. 

Mayflower  :   149. 

Meade,  George,  General :   354-6,  388,  444. 

Memphis  :   225,  274,  347,  386. 

Meridian  :   226,  386. 

Merrimac  :   291-2. 

Methodists  :    149. 

Mexico:   28,   89;   war  with,  90-2;    later  relations,  210,  255,  385-6,  401, 

4'7 

Mexico,  Gulf  of  :   27,  207. 
Michigan  :   38,  171. 
Militia  :   227,  245,  367. 
Mill,  John  Stuart :   259. 
Milligan,  case  of,  in  Supreme  Court :   376. 
Minnesota  :   27. 

Mississippi  River  :   7,  8,  13,  26,  56,  197,  225,  274,  280,  282,  346-53. 
Mississippi  State  :   26,  174,  178,198,226.     And  see  Meridian  and  Vicksburg. 
Missouri  Compromise  :    39-40  ;   repealed,  108-11  ;   question  whether  uncon 
stitutional,  111-14. 
Missouri  River  :   26. 

Missouri  State  :   27,  39-40,  112,  196,  224,  228,  243-4,  268-9,  33  ^  397- 
Mobile  :   226,  385,  392,  409. 
Moltke  :   216. 
Monroe  Doctrine  :   385. 
Montana  :   26. 
Montgomery  :    198-9,  224. 
Mormons  :   98,  129. 
Motley,  John  Lothrop  :    136,  236,  237,  414. 


NAPOLEON  I.  :   26,  214. 

Napoleon  III.  :   255,  311,  385. 

Nashville  :   337,  393-4. 

National  Bank  :   42,  47,  65. 

Nebraska:    108,112. 

Negotiations  for  peace,  impossible  demand  for  them  :   399-402,  425,  428-31. 


INDEX  473 

Negroes  :'  Lincoln  on_nption  of  equality  as  appliejjjLQ  them,  i?3  ;  Stephens 
on  greaflnoral  truth  of  their  inferiority,  178  ;  their  good  conduct 
during  the  war  and  their  valour  as  soldiers,  328  ;  Lincoln's  human 
sympathy  with  them,  and  the  right  attitude  in  face  of  the  bar  between 
the  two  races,  328-31  ;  mistaken  precipitancy  in  giving  them  the 
suffrage,  332-3,  427  ;  the  Confederacy  ultimately  enlists  negroes,  428  ; 
negro  bodyguard  at  Lincoln's  second  Inauguration,  435  ;  projects  for 
colonisation  of  negroes,  42,  317,  329,  330.  See  also  Slavery. 

Neuse  River  :   434. 

Nevada  :   95. 

New  Berne  :   434. 

New  England  :    17,  172,  240,  324. 

New  Hampshire  :   99. 

New  Jersey  :    17. 

New  Mexico  :   95,  98,  144,  193. 

New  Orleans  :  4,  13-14,  46,  197,  225,  282. 

New  Salem  :   4,  63-9,  78-80. 

New  York  City  :   29,  49,  143,  154-5,  204,  240,  253,  382. 

New  York  State  :    16,  17,  29. 

Niagara  :    104,  138,  401. 

Nicolay,  John  :   210,  234,  416,  455,  457. 

North  :  original  characteristics  and  gradual  divergence  from  South,  see 
America  and  South  ;  advantages  and  disadvantages  in  the  war, 
213-18  ;  divisions  in  the  North,  see  Democrats  and  Radicals ; 
magnitude  of  effort  and  endurance  shown  by  the  North,  361-4,  423-4. 

North  Anna  River  :   389. 

North  Carolina  :   26,  27,  193  ;   secedes  with  Virginia,  228  ;  432-4,  449. 

North-West  Territory  :   38. 

Northcote,  Sir  Stafford  :  259. 

Novels  :   67. 

Nueces  River  :   91. 

OBERLIN  :    149. 

Officers  :   219,  222-3,  34-8- 

Ohio  River  :   4,  8,  26,  116,  225,  242,  279. 

Ohio  State  :   38,  160,  171,  338-9,  342,  357,  379-81. 

Olmsted,  Frederick  Law  :   53,  57,  457. 

Oratory  in  America  :   34,  41,  132,  135,  137,  154,  158,  360. 

Oregon,  Territory  and  State  :   28,  91,  95,  in. 

Orsini  :    151. 

Owens,  Mary:   79-81. 

PAINE,  Tom  :   69. 
Palmerston  :   233,  259,  311. 
Pardon  of  offenders  by  Lincoln  :   417-19. 

Parliament :  relation  to  Colonies,  19  ;  contrast  with  Congress,  20,  23. 
Parliamentarians  under  Charles  I.  :   33. 

Party  and  Parties  :  47-50,  372-3,  383.  And  see  American,  Federalist,  Free- 
Soil,  Democratic,  Republican  and  Whig. 


474  INDEX 

Patterson,  General :   246. 

Pemberton,  General :   352-3. 

Pennsylvania  :    17,  201,  353-6. 

Peoria  :   72,  134,  141. 

Petersburg.     See  Richmond. 

Philadelphia  :    183,  354. 

Pierce,  Franklin  :   99,  109,  136,  217. 

Pilgrim's  Progress  :    10. 

Pitt,  William,  the  younger  :   374. 

Polk,  President  :   90-2. 

Polk,  Bishop  and  General,  348. 

Pope,  General :  282,  300,  302-3. 

Port  Hudson  :   341,  352-3. 

Porter,  Admiral :   347,  351,  386,  432-3,  441. 

Post  of  Arkansas  :   349. 

Potomac  :   224,  242,  248,  287,  305,  356. 

Presbyterian  :   76,  436. 

Prince  Consort  :  262. 

Prisoners  of  War  :   396. 

Protection  :  42,  45,  65,  68,  201. 

Public  Works  :  42,  65,  71. 

Puritans  :    17. 

QUAKERS  :    17,  50,  152. 

RADICALS  :   231-2,  244,  266-9,  326,  397-9,  407,  427. 

Railways  :   7,  27,  225-6,  275,  337,  386,  394,  395,  444 

Raleigh  :   434,  449. 

Rapidan  :   287,  310,  356,  389. 

Rappahannock  :   308,  310,  353,  356. 

Rathbone,  Major  :  447-8. 

Raymond:  411.     And  see  401. 

Reconstruction  :   324-6,  331-3,  396-9,  431-2,  445-7. 

Red  River  :   386. 

Republican  Party  :  (i)  Party  of  this  name  which  followed  Jefferson  and  of 
which  leading  members  were  afterwards  Democrats,  30,  31  ;  (2)  New 
party  formed  in  1854  to  resist  extension  of  slavery  in  Territories,  1 10  ; 
runs  Fremont  for  Presidency,  in  ;  embarrassed  by  Dred  Scott 
judgment,  in,  114  ;  possibility  of  differences  underlying  its  simple 
principles,  121  ;  disposition  among  its  leaders  to  support  Douglas  after 
Kansas  scandal,  140-2 ;  consistency  of  thought  and  action  supplied  to  , 

it  by  Lincoln,  121,  144-5  5  nomination  and  election  of  Lincoln,  159-61, 
165-8  ;  sections  in  the  party  during  war,  266-70  ;  increasing  diver 
gence  between  Lincoln  and  the  leading  men  in  the  party,  319,  324-7, 
398-9,  406-11,  427,  431-2,  447. 

Reuben,  First  Chronicles  of  :    11-12. 

Revolution,  American  :   20-2. 

Revolution,  French  :   31. 

Rhodes,  Cecil :   333. 

Rhodes,  James  Ford  :  415,  456. 


INDEX  475 

Richmond :  224-6,  241,  244,  274,  301,  389  ;  siege  of  Petersburg  and 
Richmond,  see  Lee  or  Grant;  feeling  in  Richmond  towards  end, 
428-9  ;  Lincoln's  visit  to  it,  443. 

Roberts,  P.M.  Earl  :   362. 

Robinson  Crusoe  :    10. 

Rollin  :   66. 

Romilly,  Samuel  :   32. 

Rosecrans,  General :   340-1,  349,  357-8. 

Russell,  Lord  John  :   259,  262,  311. 

Russia:    117,210,255. 

Rutledge,  Ann  :   79. 


ST.  GAUDENS,  Augustus  :  328. 
St.  Louis  :    115,  243. 
Salisbury,  Marquess  of  :   257,  258. 
Sangamon  :   64-5,  165. 
Savannah  :   395,  432. 
Schofield,  General :   394,  433-4. 
Schools,  Lincoln's  :    10. 
Schurz,  Carl  :   235,  421, 
Scott,  Dred,  and  his  case  :    111-14,  H3- 
Scott,  William  :  418-9. 

Scott,  Winfield,  General :   92,  99,  204,  207,  230,  245-8,  273-4,  386,  450. 
Secession.     See  South  and  Confederacy. 

Seward,  William  :    opponent  of  compromise  of  1850  and  rising  Republican 
leader,  100,  136,  151  ;   against  opposing  Douglas,  140  ;   speaks  well 
of  John  Brown,  151  ;  expected  to  be  Republican  candidate  for  Presi 
dency,   rejected   partly  for  his   unworthy   associates,  more   for  his 
supposed  strong  opinions,  160-7;  supports  Lincoln  in  election,  168  ; 
action  during  progress  of  Secession,  192-4,  204  ;  on  First  Inaugural, 
205  ;   action  during  crisis  of  Fort  Sumter,  207-9  ;    vain  attempt  to 
master  Lincoln  and  generous  acceptance  of  defeat,  209-10,  249  ;  his 
part  in  foreign  policy,  261-4,  385  ;  wise  advice  to  postpone  Emanci 
pation,  318  ;   retained  by  Lincoln  in  spite  of  intrigues  against  him, 
326-7  ;  administration  of  martial  law,  374  ;  his  usefulness  and  great 
loyalty,  403  ;  his  judgment  on  McClellan,  423  ;  attempt  to  assassinate 
him,  448  ;  certifies  ratification  of  I3th  amendment,  334. 
Seymour,  Horatio  :    379,  381-3,  410. 
Sigel,  General  :   391. 
Shakespeare  :    102,  107,  420,  445. 
Shaw,  Robert  Gould  :   328. 

Shenandoah  Valley  :   224,  246,  295,  391,  392-3,  421,  434-5. 
Sheridan,  Philip,  General :   219,  341,  392-3,  421,  434-5,  441. 
Sherman,  John,  Senator  :    234,  378. 

Sherman,  William  Tecumseh,  General :  53,  219,  223,  248  ;  character  and 
relations  with  Grant,  346  ;  failure  in  first  attempt  on  Vicksburg, 
348  ;  under  McClernand,  takes  Post  of  Arkansas,  349  ;  with  Grant 
in  rest  of  Vicksburg  campaigns,  351-3;  at  Chattanooga,  358;  at 
Meridian,  386  ;  parting  with  Grant,  his  fears  for  him,  their  concerted 
plans,  387 ;  Atlanta  campaign,  391-2,  421  ;  detaches  Thomas 


476  INDEX 

against  Hood,  393-4  ;  from  Atlanta  to  the  sea,  393-5  ;   campaigns  in 
the  Carolinas,  432-4  ;  meets  Lincoln  at  City  Point,  441-2  ;   Lincoln's 
dream  about  him,  446  5  Johnston's  surrender  to  him,  449. 
Shields,  Colonel :   85. 

Slave  Trade  :  how  treated  by  Constitution  of  U.S.A.,  24  ;  prohibition  of  it 
in  American  colonies  vetoed,  36;  prohibited  by  several  American 
States,  by  United  Kingdom,  and  by  Union,  38  ;  movement  to  revive 
it  in  Southern  States,  144,  149  ;  prohibited  by  Confederate  Consti 
tution  and  inadequate  Bill  against  it  vetoed  by  J.  Davis,  199  ;  treaty 
between  United  Kingdom  and  U.S.A.,  for  its  more  effectual  preven 
tion,  and  first  actual  execution  of  a  slave-trader  in  U.S.A.,  315. 
Slavery  :  compromise  about  it  in  Constitution,  25^  opinion  and  action  of 
the  'rFathers  "  in  regard  to  it,  35-9  ;  becomes  more  firmly  rooted  in 
South,  39^  disputes  as  to  it  temporarily  settled  by  Missouri  Com 
promise;5;^^  ;  its  real  character  in  America,  52-5  ;  its  political  and 
social  effect  oh  the  South,  43-5,  55-9  ;  Abolition  movement,  see 
Abolition  ;  its  increasing  influence  on  Southern  policy,  see  South  ; 
repeal  of  Missouri  Compromise,  and  dicta  of  Supreme  Court  in 
favour  of  slavery,  108-14  5  Lincoln's  attitude  from  first  in  regard  to 
it,  Hj2&  93  '  *"s  principles  as  to  it^Lzo-^J^j  slavery  the  sole 
cause  of  Secession,  177-8  5  ItEe  progTess^oractual  Emancipation, 
311-35  ;  already  coming  to  an  end  in  the  South  before  the  end  of  the 
war,  426,  428.  See  also  Negroes. 
Slidell :  262. 

Smith,  Baldwin,  General :    307. 
Smith,  Caleb  :    1 66,  201,  402. 
Smith,  Kirby,  General  :   337-40,  450. 

South  :  original  difference  of  character  and  interest  between  Northern  and 
Southern  States  becoming  more  marked  concurrently  with  growth 
of  Union,  17-8,  36,  39-40,  43-5  ;  slavery  and  Southern  society,  52-9  ; 
growing  power  of  a  Southern  policy  for  slavery  to  which  the  North 
generally  is  subservient,  90-1,  97-9,  116,  137-40  ;  rise  of  resistance  to  ' 
this,  see  Republican  Party  ;  causes  of  Secession  and  prevailing  feeling 
in  South  about  it,  169-87  ;  history  of  Secession  and  War,  see  Con 
federacy  and  War  ;  Southern  spirit  in  the  war,  215,  217-8  ;  heroism 
of  struggle,  396  ;  memory  of  the  war  a  common  inheritance  to  North 
and  South,  452. 
South  Carolina  :  26-7,  36,  44-6,  57-8,  172,  178-9,  181,  184-9,  199-200,  207, 

252,  3J9>  384,  432- 
Spain  :    16,  26,  90,  210. 
Speed,  James  :   402. 

Speed,  Joshua  :   69,  70,  81,  87,  115-7,  4°2,  437- 
Spoils  System  :   49-50,  94,  253-4. 
Springfield  :    Lincoln's  life  there,  69-77,  81-7,  100-8  ;    his  farewell  speech 

there,  202  ;  his  funeral  there,  450. 

Stanton,   Edwin  :    rude   to  Lincoln  in  law  case,   services  in   Buchanan's 
Cabinet,  denounces  Lincoln's  administration,  made  Secretary  of  War, 
271  ;  great  mistake  as  to  recruiting,  298,  366  ;  Conservative  hostility 
to  him,  326-7  ;   services  in  War  Department  and  loyalty  to  Lincoln, 
271,  289,  327,  387,  403,  416-7  ;   at  Lincoln's  death-bed,  450. 
States  :    relations  to  Federal  Government  and  during  secession  to  Con 
federacy,  24,  220-2. 
Stephens,  Alexander  :    178,  198-9,  429-31. 


INDEX  477 

Stevenson,  Robert  Louis  :   87. 

Stowe,  Mrs.  Beecher  :   51,  54,  109. 

Submarines  :   250. 

Sumner,  Charles  :    100,  137-8,  415,  4*6-7>  445- 

Supreme  Court:  41,  111-4,  H3>  37^>  382. 

Swedish  colonists  :    17. 

Swett,  Leonard  :    13. 

TALLEYRAND  :  29. 

Taney,  Roger :    111-4,  !43>  205>  24r>  420"- 

Taylor,  Zachary  :   91-2,  94,  97. 

Tennessee  River  :   225,  279,  337. 

Tennessee  State :  27,  198,  225,  228,  274-6,  278-83,  336-8,  340-1,  393-4, 
397,  408. 

Tennyson,  Alfred  :  258. 

Territories  :  their  position  under  Constitution,  25  ;  expansion  and  settle 
ment,  26-8  ;  cessions  of  Territories  by  States  to  Union,  38  ;  conflict 
as  to  slavery  in  them,  see  Slavery. 

Terry,  General :  433. 

Texas  :   28,  90,  197,  198,  386,  450. 

Thomas,  George  H.,  General :   230,  279,  339,  341,  358,  386,  393-4. 

Todd,  Mary.     See  Lincoln,  Mrs. 

Trumbull,  Lynam  :    119. 

Tyler,  John  :   72,  90,  199. 

"  Underground  Railway  "  :    149. 

UNION  and  United  States.     See  America. 

Union  men  :   letter  of  Lincoln  to  great  meeting  of,  383-4. 

Urbana  :   290-1. 

Usher  :   402. 

Utah:   98. 

VALLANDIGHAM,  Clement :   377,  379-81,  410. 

Van  Buren,  Martin  :  47,  49,  66. 

Vandalia  :   72. 

Vermont :    16,  38. 

Vicksburg  :   225,  282,  337,  346-53,  446. 

Victoria,  Queen  :   262,  451. 

Virginia  :    3,  27,  37,  38,  39,  47,  54,  69,  97,  196-9,  208,  212,  216,  227  ;  and  for 

stages  of  war  in  Virginia  see  McClellan,  Lee  and  Shenandoah  Valley. 
Volney  :   69. 
Voltaire  :   69. 
Voluntary  enlistment  in  the  North,  220-1  ;  results  here  and  in  U.S.A.,  362-3  ; 

its  fundamental  immorality  when  used  on  a  large  scale,  364. 

WADE,  Senator  :    193,  398. 
Walker,  Governor  :    139. 
Wallace,  General:  391. 


478  INDEX 

War,  Civil,  in  U.S.A.  :  general  conditions  and  strategic  aspects  of  the  war, 
213-26,  272-7  ;  preliminary  struggles  in  border  States,  227-44  5  first 
Battle  of  Bull  Run,  244-9  5  blockade  of  South  and  naval  operations 
generally,  250-2  ;  war  in  West  to  occupation  of  Corinth  and  taking  of 
New  Orleans,  278-83  ;  Merrimac  and  Monitor,  291-2  ;  beginning  of 
Peninsula  campaign,  289-94 ;  "  Stonewall "  Jackson's  Valley 
campaign,  294-6 ;  end  of  Peninsula  campaign,  297-301  ;  second 
Battle  of  Bull  Run,  302-3  ;  Lee's  invasion  of  Maryland  and  Antietam, 
303-6;  Fredericksburg,  308;  Chancellorsville,  310;  Buell's  opera 
tions  in  autumn  of  1863,  Confederate  invasion  of  Kentucky,  and 
Murfreesborough,  336-41  ;  Vicksburg  campaigns  and  completion  of, 
conquest  of  Mississippi,  346-353  ;  Lee's  invasion  of  Pennsylvania, 
Gettysburg,  and  Meade's  campaign  in  Virginia,  353-6  ;  campaigns  of 
Chickamanga,  Eastern  Tennessee,  and  Chattanooga,  356-8  ;  certain 
minor  operations,  384-6  ;  military  situation  at  beginning  of  1864  and 
Grant's  plans,  384,  387  ;  Grant's  campaign  against  Lee  to  beginning 
of  siege  of  Petersburg,  388-90  ;  Early's  Shenandoah  campaign,  391  ; 
Sherman's  Atlanta  campaign,  391-2 ;  Farragut  at  Mobile,  392 ; 
Sheridan  in  Lower  Shenandoah  Valley,  392-3;  Sherman's  plans,  393  ; 
Hood's  invasion  of  Tennessee,  393-4  ;  Sherman's  march  to  Savannah, 
394-5  ;  Petersburg  siege  continues,  395  ;  effect  of  Sherman's  opera 
tions,  428  ;  Sherman's  advance  northward  from  Savannah,  432  ; 
Porter  and  Terry  take  Fort  Fisher, 432-3  ^Petersburg  siege  progresses, 
433  ;  Sherman  in  North  Carolina,  433-4  ;  Sheridan  in  Upper  Shenan 
doah  Valley,  434-5  ;  fall  of  Petersburg  and  Richmond  and  surrender 
of  Lee,  442-5  ;  surrender  of  other  Confederate  forces,  449-50. 

Ward,  Artemus  :  207,  230,  322. 

Washington  City  :  its  importance  and  dangers  in  the  war,  224,  238-41,  247, 
f  292-3,  294-6,  301,  303,  353-4,  374,  390-1  ;  its  political  society,  415. 

Washington,  George  :    10,  21,  37,  76,  202-3,  386. 

Watson,  William  :  457. 

Webster,  Daniel :  his  career  and  services,  41-2  ;  his  great  speech,  45-6,  172  ; 
value  of  his  support  to  Whigs,  68  ;  Lincoln  meets  him,  90  ;  his  support 
of  compromise  of  1850  and  his  death,  98-9. 

Weed,  Thurlow  :    192-3,  411,  440.  ^ 

Weems'  Life  of  Washington  :    10. 

Welles,  Gideon  :   201,  251-2,  262,  270,  403. 

Wellington  :   375. 

Wesley,  Samuel :   35. 

West,  the  :   7-9,  27-8,  46,  61,  90,  92,  154,  223,  225,  302,  304.     And  see  War. 

West  Indies,  British  :   29,  52. 

West  Point :   222,  390. 

West  Virginia  :   224,  228,  242,  295,  332,  397. 

Whig  Party  :   48,  66-8,  90-2,  94,  99,  no,  116,  158,  430. 

Whites,  Poor  or  Mean  :   55,  177. 

Whitman,  Walt :   61,  236,  237,  415-6. 

Whitney,  Eli :   39. 

Wilmington  :   250,  432-3. 

Wilmot,  David  and  Wilmot  Proviso  :   95,  98,  116. 

Wilson,  President :   45,  54. 

Wisconsin  :   38,  171. 

Wood  and  Edmonds  ;   232,  456. 


V 


7  D4Y  tt 

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